Lee Ann Tysseling

Lee Ann Tysseling has been a teacher and professor of English language arts and literacy for thirty-eight years. She holds degrees from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of Iowa. The majority of her teaching positions have been in middle and high school. For the past twenty-five years she has taught in colleges and universities, and she has been on the faculty at Boise State University for the last nineteen years. Her areas of specialization are literacy and technology, content area literacy, remedial reading, adolescent literature, and assessment of literacy.

Lee Ann says that she became a teacher because she wanted a job where she would be paid to read books. "I stayed in the profession because I got addicted to solving puzzles about learning and teaching. I love the complexity of using information about students, their learning strengths and weaknesses, the curriculum, and the world to find ways to do interesting things in the classroom—things that move students forward in their literacy development and help build enthusiasm or even passion for learning."

Lee Ann enjoys the fact that teaching days are never boring and that she and her students get to engage in creative work in the classroom. Lately she has also had the great joy of seeing the teachers she got to know via professional development work meet the challenges of twenty-first-century schools.

A resident of Idaho, Lee Ann has also lived in Wisconsin and Iowa and enjoys visiting family and friends throughout the country. During the summer she loves to garden and hike/camp. During the winter she likes to make greeting cards and snowboard. She reads voraciously all year long and documents her reading on her blog (leesbooks.blogspot.com).

Her newest exploration is game-based educational design, and she is currently trying to stay alive and move through the ranks of World of Warcraft.