Here's the ideal guide for the conscientious educator dedicated to moving students toward better literacy — a comprehensive, interactive resource that helps you examine, and improve, your teaching behavior and pedagogy.

Designed to help develop the literacy teacher's awareness of how behaviors can effect instruction in the classroom, this book takes you on an inner teaching journey that helps you use self-reflection as a motivation for change. The easy-to-follow, self-guiding approach scaffolds you, a study group, or professional development session toward reflection that promotes change.

In this book, you see how to reflect on and attain six behavior-oriented teaching goals that make a difference in helping children become lifelong literacy learners: enthusiasm, unity, kindness, understanding, pursuit of knowledge, and collegiality. Working within these goals, you learn to establish an environment in which both the teacher and students are more comfortable learning.

The goals are supported by national and international professional organizations' dispositions and teaching guidelines, research on the characteristics of exemplary literacy teachers, and personal teaching experiences related to literacy and the integration of literacy in content areas.

Written in a style that provides you with an interactive reading experience and is suitable for individual, small-group, or school professional development materials, the book introduces the rationale for the dispositions and explains them in relationship to literacy instruction. Each goal has been given a descriptive word that summarizes the corresponding disposition making or behavior to achieve, giving you an easy way to make associations with teaching behaviors and ultimately apply those behaviors the literacy classroom.

If you believe the most important person who can be the agent of change in the classroom is the teacher, this book is for you! You owe it to yourself, your students, and your school to put these ideas to the test in improving teaching and learning in your literacy classroom. Order your copy today!

"The book provides useful tools for teachers to guide them as they grow and to assist them in becoming reflective practitioners." — Jan Wells, M.Ed., Educational Consultant