• Increasing the amount of reading and writing students are doing while giving students more choice around those activities
• Balancing rigorous, high-quality literature and non-fiction works with student-selected titles
• Encouraging readers to deepen their comprehension by moving beyond the “four corners of the text”
• Planning lessons that move beyond Common Core expectations to help young writers achieve more authenticity through the blending of genres
• Using modeling to enrich students’ writing skills in the prewriting, drafting, and revision stages
• Resisting the de-emphasis of narrative and imaginative reading and writing

• Valuing standardized testing over the development of lifelong readers
• Mandating breadth over depth in instruction 
• Requiring students to read difficult texts without proper instructional support and insisting students focus on academic texts
• Ignoring the importance of developing recreational reading
• Losing sight of authentic instruction in the looming shadow of political pressures

Do your students often struggle with difficult novels and other challenging texts? Do you feel that you are doing more work teaching the novel than they are reading it?

Building on twenty years of teaching language arts, Kelly Gallagher shows how students can be taught to successfully read a broad range of challenging and difficult texts with deeper levels of comprehension. In Deeper Reading: Comprehending Challenging Texts, 4-12, he shares effective, classroom-tested strategies that enable your students to:

• Accept the challenge of reading difficult books and move beyond a "first draft" understanding
• Consciously monitor their comprehension as they read and employ effective "fix-it" strategies when comprehension starts to falter
• Use meaningful collaboration and metaphorical thinking to achieve deeper understanding of texts
• Reflect on the relevance the book holds for themselves and their peers by using critical thinking skills to analyze real-world issues

Gallagher also provides guidance on effective lesson planning that incorporates strategies for deeper reading.

Funny, poignant, and packed with practical ideas that work in real classrooms, Deeper Reading is a valuable resource for any teacher whose students need new tools to uncover the riches found in complex texts.

In an increasingly demanding world of literacy, it has become critical that students know how to write effectively. From the requirements of standardized tests to those of the wired workplace, the ability to write well, once a luxury, has become a necessity. Many students are leaving school without the necessary writing practice and skills needed to compete in a complex and fast-moving Information Age. Unless we teach them how to run with it, they are in danger of being run over by a stampede—a literacy stampede.

InTeaching Adolescent Writers, Kelly Gallagher shows how students can be taught to write effectively. Gallagher shares a number of classroom-tested strategies that enable teachers to:

• Understand the importance of teaching writing and how to motivate young writers
• Show how modeling from both the teacher and real-world texts builds young writers
• Provide choice of what to write, which helps elevate adolescent writing, and how to fit it into a rigorous curriculum
• Help students recognize the importance of purpose and audience
• Assess essays in ways that drive better writing performance.

Infused with humor and illuminating anecdotes, Gallagher draws on his classroom experiences and work as co-director of a regional writing project to offer teachers both practical ways to incorporate writing instruction into their day and compelling reasons to do so.