The End of Your Career Book Club: Ten Books That Shaped My Teaching Life, Part II
Now it's Claudia Swisher's turn. Claudia started teaching in 1967. She's been a school librarian, a remedial reading teacher, and a classroom teacher, for 39 years, in three states, seven schools, and for ten principals, teaching four of her first five years on emergency permits. Here are here ten most influential books.
Just as I was cleaning out my last classroom for the last time, my friend Nancy Flanagan gave me an assignment: identify my ten most influential professional books, and give my evidence. What fun! I stacked up about 15 books immediately and then started the process of choosing my final ten. I see most of them as putting into words something I didn't even know I needed to know. Giving me permission to be more authentic about my own work. Every author is fierce and passionate about children and how they learn.
So, roughly in the order I read them:
Reading Without Nonsense by Frank Smith - Smith is a psycholinguist who created the framework for reading instruction that was the backbone of my work at Indiana University. I still use the concepts of reading as prediction and asking questions. "Reading is asking