This month we are featuring the book, Hacking Literacy: 5 Ways To Turn Any Classroom Into a Culture of Readers. In the book, Hacking Literacy: 5 Ways To Turn Any Classroom Into a Culture of Readers, classroom teacher and reading consultant, Gerard Dawson, reveals 5 simple ways any educator can turn even the most reluctant reader into a thriving, enthusiastic lover of books. Along the way, Dawson identifies problems that educators face as they attempt to teach often-reluctant learners to read and write daily, and he provides examples and anecdotes from other educators who have built their own reading cultures. Education hackers like Gerard Dawson are tinkerers and fixers. As with all hackers, they see solutions to problems that other people do not see. They are specialists who grapple with issues that need to be turned upside down or viewed with a different lens. The fixes they suggest may appear unusual at first, but as each chapter unfolds, their purposes will become clear and you’ll be as eager as you’ve ever been to implement them immediately in your own classroom and school.
Inside the book
This book contains chapters called Hacks, which are composed of these sections:
- The Problem: Something educators are currently wrestling with that doesn’t appear to have a clear solution.
- The Hack: A brief description of the author’s unique fix.
- What You Can Do Tomorrow: Ways you can take the basic hack and implement it right away in bare-bones form.
- Blueprint for Full Implementation: A step-by-step system for building long-term capacity.
- Overcoming Pushback: A list of possible objections you might come up against in your attempt to implement this hack and how to overcome each one.
- The Hack in Action: A snapshot of an educator or group of educators who have used this hack in their work and how they did it.
Each week we scour the internet to find incredible books to highlight on our various social networks (@TESOL, @AmericanTESOL, and @ESLWebinars). Check out our past favorites here.
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