"You Gotta BE the Book"

This award-winning book continues to resonate with teachers and inspire their teaching because it focuses on the joy of reading and how it can engage and even transform readers. In a time of next-generation standards that emphasize higher-order strategies, text complexity, and the reading of nonfiction, “You Gotta BE the Book” continues to help teachers meet new challenges, including those of increasing cultural diversity. At the core of Wilhelm’s foundational text is an in-depth account of what highly motivated adolescent readers actually do when they read, and how to help struggling readers take on those same stances and strategies. His work offers a robust model teachers can use to prepare students for the demands of disciplinary understanding and for literacy in the real world. The Third Edition includes new commentaries and tips for using visual techniques, drama and action strategies, think-aloud protocols, and symbolic story representation/reading manipulatives.

Book Features:

• A data-driven theory of literature and literary reading as engagement.
• A case for undertaking teacher research with students.
• An approach for using drama and visual art to support readers’ comprehension.
• Guidance for assisting students in the use of higher-order strategies of reading (and writing) as required by next-generation standards like the Common Core.
• Classroom interventions to help all students, especially reluctant ones, become successful readers.
• Online resources, including inquiry unit templates, tools for teaching with drama, and tips for using visual techniques.

Jeffrey D. Wilhelm is an internationally known teacher, author, presenter, National Writing Project director, and distinguished professor of English Education at Boise State University. He is the coauthor of Teaching Literacy for Love and Wisdom: Being the Book and Being the Change and The Activist Learner: Inquiry, Literacy, and Service to Make Learning Matter.

"This important book remains on the must-read list for literacy teachers working with adolescent learners."

—CHOICE

"Exceptionally well written, organized and presented, this new and expanded third edition of "'You Gotta BE the Book'': Teaching Engaged and Reflective Reading with Adolescents" is a fundamentally critical and important addition to college and university Teacher Education collections and supplemental studies lists."

—Midwest Book Review

"I hope this book is read and considered by all the stakeholders who can make a difference in education by following Wilhelm's lead of improving instruction to enhance students' lives."

—Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy

“New readers of ‘You Gotta BE The Book’ will find Wilhelm’s work around adolescent reader response to be powerful and informative. Familiar readers will find the opportunity to consider his work in new ways and the updates refreshing.”

—Teachers College Record

"This book points the way for us to understand how we can help our students enter a story world through drama, symbolic story representations, and the use of visual art and other non-traditional texts. It points the way for us to cast our students as experts and collaborators in the educational enterprise."
–From the Foreword by Michael W. Smith, associate dean, Temple University, College of Education

“You Gotta BE the Book" is one of the most important books for anyone interested in adolescents and reading. Simply put, it is a classic—timeless in its basic approach and yet full of relevant ideas and strategies for the era of Common Core in which we currently find ourselves. If you are a teacher, you gotta have 'You Gotta BE the Book!'”
—Deborah Appleman, professor, Carleton College, author of Critical Encounters in Secondary English, Third Edition

“Based on years of research, this edition provides extensive activities on how to engage reluctant readers. This book is essential reading for any literacy teacher.”
—Richard Beach, University of Minnesota

“Wilhelm's book is one of the essentials for a literacy educator's bookshelf, because it shows in detail how teachers can help readers really inhabit texts instead of remaining disconnected and distant from what they read. ‘You Gotta BE the Book’ offers a pathway beyond comprehension to real engagement.”
—Randy Bomer, The University of Texas at Austin

Online Exhibits