• 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

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.

In Reading Reasons: Motivational Mini-Lessons for Middle and High School, author and teacher Kelly Gallagher offers a series of mini-lessons specifically tailored to motivate middle and high school students to read, and in doing so, to help them understand the importance and relevance reading will take in their lives. This book introduces and explains in detail nine specific "real-world" reasons why students should be readers.

The book contains 40 practical, classroom-tested and reproducible mini-lessons that get to the heart of reading motivation and that can be used immediately in English and other content-area classrooms. These easy-to-use motivational lessons serve as weekly reading "booster shots" that help maintain reading enthusiasm in your classroom from September through June. The mini-lessons, ranging from 5-20 minutes in length, hit home with adolescents, and in turn, enable them to internalize the importance reading will play in their lives. Rather than telling students reading is good for them, the lessons in this book show them the benefits of reading.