Preventing Misguided Reading

Prevent guided reading from going astray in your classroom! Through the 50 years of collective experience of authors Jan Burkins and Melody Croft, you'll resolve confusion about guided reading and improve your instruction.

Burkins and Croft present personal clarifications, adaptations, and supports that helped them work through their own tricky spots as they guided readers. The book's six chapters clarify misunderstandings about guided reading instruction in the following areas:
• The teacher's role and the gradual release of responsibility
• Instructional reading level
• Text gradients
• Balanced instruction
• Integrated processing
• Assessment

With 27 strategies, you're sure to find the help you need to work through your own tricky parts as you guide groups of readers.

Jan Miller Burkins is currently completing her sixth year as a full-time coach at Chase Street Elementary School, Athens, Georgia. She has worked as a language arts consultant for a regional educational service agency, a district-level literacy coordinator, a reading specialist, and an elementary classroom teacher. Her work as a consultant has taken her into elementary, middle, and high schools where she has helped school leaders examine their reading instruction, modeled lessons, and facilitated professional learning.

Burkins is also a part-time assistant professor at the University of Georgia, where she teaches classes to students pursuing graduate degrees in literacy education. She has also developed a series of courses for educators interested in becoming literacy coaches. Burkins is the author of Coaching for Balance: Meeting the Challenges of Literacy Coaching.

In 1989, Burkins received her undergraduate degree in early childhood education from Birmingham-Southern College in Birmingham, Alabama, and in 1993 her master’s from the University of Alabama. She later earned her reading specialist certification and her doctorate from the University of Kansas in 1999. Her dissertation, which was a meta-analysis of the research on phonemic awareness, was the Dissertation of the Year for the University of Kansas School of Education and one of three finalists for the International Reading Association’s Dissertation of the Year.