Katie Egan Cunningham




Katie Egan Cunningham is passionate about supporting students to find joy in learning through small shifts in teachers’ practices that can make a big difference. She is an avid reader of children’s literature and believes in the power of stories to build connections and change lives. Katie has twenty years of experience as an educator in many different roles to support students and teachers including classroom teacher, literacy specialist, literacy consultant, and teacher educator.

Katie is the author of Start with Joy: Designing Literacy Instruction for Student Happiness (Stenhouse, 2019) and Story: Still the Heart of Literacy Learning (Stenhouse, 2015). She is also a co-author of Literacy Leadership in Changing Schools (Teachers College Press, 2016) as well as the weekly children’s literature blog, The Classroom Bookshelf, part of the School Library Journal blog network. Katie has degrees from Princeton University and New York University and holds a doctorate in Curriculum and Instruction from Teachers College, Columbia University where her research focused on read-alouds.

Katie is an Associate Professor of Literacy and English Education at Manhattanville College and her research and teaching focus on student and teacher happiness, literacy methods, new technologies, critical literacies, and children’s literature. Katie is a frequent speaker at the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and International Literacy Association (ILA) national conventions and she has been a frequent contributor to the children’s literature column of NCTE’s journal Language Arts. As an educator and parent, she is also an active supporter of free play movements in her local community. Katie can often be found reading or playing with her two sons in the woods outside her home in Connecticut or on beaches up and down the East Coast.

Katie Egan Cunningham

Websites:
katieegancunningham.com and 
theclassroombookshelf.com

Twitter: @kegancunningham

Titles by Author (shown below):
3 products
Start with Joy
Start with Joy
Katie Cunningham
Paperback
$41.33 $31.00 Save $10.33
Shifting the Balance, Grades 3–5
Shifting the Balance, Grades 3–5
Katie Cunningham
Paperback
$44.67 $33.50 Save $11.17
Story:
Story:
Katie Cunningham
Paperback
$33.33 $25.00 Save $8.33
Katie Cunningham:::100177

Start with Joy

9781625312839

$41.33 $31.00 Save $10.33

In Start with Joy: Designing Literacy Learning for Student Happiness, author Katie Cunningham links what we know from the science of happiness with what we know about effective literacy instruction. When given a choice about what to write, children express hopes, fears, and reactions to life’s experiences. Literacy learning is full of opportunities for students to learn tools to live a happy life. 

Inside, you’ll find:

  • Seven Pillars: Cunningham discusses the seven pillars that guide her classrooms and are involved in each literacy lesson—Connection, Choice, Challenge, Play, Story, Discovery, and Movement.
  • Ten Invitations: Designed for teachers to improvise and make their own, these ten lessons may be presented at any time of year in the context of any unit and include children’s literature suggestions as well as recommended teacher talk to meet children’s specific needs.
  • Teaching Tools: Tools and resources that will help students tell their stories and make literacy learning something all students celebrate and cherish.


This book honors the adventure that learning is meant to be and aims to make happiness more tangible in the classroom. By infusing school days with happiness, teachers can support children as they become stronger readers, writers, and thinkers, while also helping them learn that strength comes from challenge, and joy comes from leading a purposeful life.

 
Start with Joy
Katie Cunningham:::100177

Shifting the Balance, Grades 3–5

9781625315977

$44.67 $33.50 Save $11.17
In this much anticipated follow-up to their groundbreaking book, Shifting the Balance: 6 Ways to Bring the Science of Reading into the Balanced Literacy Classroom, authors Jan Burkins and Kari Yates, together with co-author Katie Cunningham, extend the conversation in Shifting the Balance, Grades 3-5: 6 Ways to Bring the Science of Reading into the Upper Elementary Classroom. This new text is built in mind specifically for grades 3-5 teachers around best practices for the intermediate classroom. 

Shifting the Balance, Grades 3-5 introduces six more shifts across individual chapters that:
  • Zoom in on a common (but not-as helpful-as-we-had-hoped) practice to reconsider
  • Untangle a number of “misunderstandings” that have likely contributed to the use of the common practice
  • Propose a more science-aligned shift to the current practice
  • Provide solid scientific research to support the revised practice
  • Offer a collection of high-leverage, easy-to-implement instructional routines to support the shift to more brain-friendly instruction
The authors offer a refreshing approach that is respectful, accessible, and practical – grounded in an earnest commitment to building a bridge between research and classroom practice. As with the first Shifting the Balance, they aim to keep students at the forefront of reading instruction. 
 
Shifting the Balance, Grades 3–5
Katie Cunningham:::100177

Story:

9781625310248

$33.33 $25.00 Save $8.33
Stories are all around us. From our digital newsfeeds, interactions with one another, to watching a movie or listening to a curated playlist, we see and hear different tales told to us in various ways.

In her book, Story: Still the Heart of Literacy Learning, author and teacher Katie Egan Cunningham reminds us that when we bridge reading strategies with the power of story, we can deepen literacy learning and foster authentic engagement with students. Cunningham shows how to create classrooms of caring and inquisitive readers, writers, and storytellers. Inside you’ll find:
  • How to build a diverse, multicultural classroom library that reflects all voices through rich, purposeful, and varied texts
  • Numerous examples of multi-genre and multi-modal stories from children’s and young adult literature
  • A practical toolkit at the end of each chapter to demonstrate how to make stories come alive in any classroom
 
Throughout the book, Cunningham shares her experiences as a teacher, literacy specialist, and staff developer and how building and talking about stories brings them to life. She honors the importance of teaching strategies to read different kinds of text, to write across genres, and to speak and listen with purpose while reminding us about the importance of story.
 
Story: