I'd like to welcome you to a dramatically different world of reading, one where we honor and celebrate what readers do in their drive to make sense of print, where error isn't necessarily bad and is indeed often a sign of strength. This is a world where teachers can focus not on labeling and categorizing readers, but on listening to and understanding them move forward based on what we know about them right now.

Sandra Wilde

The process of reading is not a half sleep, but in the highest sense, an exercise, a gymnast's struggle: that the reader is to do something for him or herself, must be on the alert, just construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay--the text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start, the framework.

Walt Whitman

It may be that as we [adults] reintroduce ourselves to our own reading processes, we need to make conscious the strategies our minds have used subconsciously for so many years.

Ellin Keene and Susan Zimmerman

The problem is that when we tell kids they have to seek connections as readers, we're teaching them to stop engaging in stories and start looking for distractions. And no one can be engaged and distracted at the same time.

Nancie Atwell

We need consistency for the children so we know where to start and where to go.

Julie Wollman

It's important for teachers to structure their literacy program so as to have time to confer with students individually about their reading.

Constance Weaver

What one reads becomes part of what one sees and feels.

Ralph Ellison

When I can't understand as a reader, I ask. I also reread, highlight, look things up in reference books or on the Internet, write notes to myself to try to work it out, or talk about the selection with someone else. . . I think that when teachers and students move beyond the stories of the reading workshop, to consider comprehension in the content-area disciplines, then, yes, indeed: it is appropriate, sensible, and helpful to talk about strategies for furthering one's understanding.

Nancie Atwell

Do not use texts being read aesthetically for the explicit teaching of reading skills. Do not risk ruining the reading of stories by teaching children to focus on how they are processing them.

Louise Rosenblatt

There is not a thing wrong with teaching to the [reading] test.

Margaret Spelling

. . .[R]eading and writing should be emancipatory acts. When students are taught to read 'the word and the world,' as Brazilian educator Paulo Freire wrote, then their minds become unshackled. . . We must teach students how to 'read' not only novels and science texts, but cartoons, politicians, workplaces, well-fare offices, and Jenny Craig ads. We need to get students to 'read' the inequitable distribution of funds for schools. This is 'rising up' reading--reading that challenges, that organizes for a better world.

Linda Christensen

If teachers can slow down their thinking and notice what they do as expert readers of their content, they will know how to design effective reading strategy instruction. They can show students through modeling their own reading process how proficient readers attack different kinds of tests.

Cris Tovani

If teachers are going to make the process of reading visible, they can't sit safely at the edge. As older, more experienced readers, they have an obligation to talk about groping for understanding or reaching for a genuine reading.

Dennie Palmer Wolf

To completely analyze what we do when we read would almost be the acme of the psychologist's achievements, for it would be to describe very many of the most intricate workings of the human mind.

E.B. Huey

If the reading is too hard, I just get Cliff Notes or skim through chapters. If I can't get Cliff Notes, I just listen to what the teacher and kids in the class say.

Jay, high school sophomore

Reading furnishes the mind only with material of knowledge. It is thinking that makes what we read ours.

C.S. Lewis

In reading, there is a sort of half-and-half mixture. The book must be good, but the reader must also be active.

Ralph Waldo Emerson