Strategies That Work: Teaching Comprehension for Understanding, Engagement, and Building Knowledge, Grades K-8, 3rd Edition

In this new edition of their ground breaking book Strategies That Work, Stephanie Harvey and Anne Goudvis share the work and thinking they’ve done since the second edition came out a decade ago and offer new perspectives on how to explicitly teach thinking strategies so that students become engaged, thoughtful, independent readers.

Thirty new lessons and new and revised chapters shine a light on children’s thinking, curiosity, and questions. Steph and Anne tackle close reading, close listening, text complexity, and critical thinking in a new chapter on building knowledge through thinking-intensive reading and learning. Other fully revised chapters focus on digital reading, strategies for integrating comprehension and technology, and comprehension across the curriculum.

The new edition is organized around three sections:

1. Part I provides readers with a solid introduction to reading comprehension instruction, including the principles that guide practice, suggestions for text selection, a review of recent research, that underlies comprehension instruction.
2. Part II contains lessons to put these principles into practice for all areas of reading comprehension.
3. Part III shows you how to integrate comprehension instruction across the curriculum and the school day, particularly in science and social studies.

Readers can access updated bibliographies online, including the popular "Great Books for Teaching Content."

Since the first publication of Strategies That Work, over a million teachers have benefited from Steph and Anne’s practical advice on creating classrooms that are incubators for deep thought. This third edition is a must-have resource for a generation of new teachers –and a welcome refresher for those with dog-eared copies of this timeless guide to teaching comprehension.

About The Authors:

Anne Goudvis has been a classroom teacher, staff developer, and adjunct professor of reading and social studies. For the past ten years, she has worked at the Denver-based Public Education and Business Coalition as a staff developer and co-director of the Library Power project, a national initiative to improve teaching and learning in libraries and classrooms.

Stephanie Harvey has spent the past thirty years teaching and learning about reading and writing. She received her B.A. from the University of Denver and her M.A. from the University of Colorado.

After fifteen years of regular elementary and special education teaching in the Jefferson County Schools in Lakewood, Colorado, Stephanie became a staff developer for the Denver-based Public Education and Business Coalition (PEBC), a partnership of leaders from education and business who support innovation in public schools. In that role, she has worked with educators throughout Colorado coordinating literacy projects, leading workshops, and conducting classroom demonstrations.

Insatiably curious about student thinking, she is a teacher first and foremost and continues to work in schools on a regular basis, savoring any time spent with kids. Stephanie also serves as a private consultant to schools and districts throughout the country. She travels extensively and works with educators in inner-city, suburban, and rural districts. A regular presenter and keynote speaker at conferences, she speaks on reading comprehension; active literacy; nonfiction reading; writing and research; inquiry based learning; reading and writing workshop; and the role of passion, wonder, and engagement in teaching and learning.

Each summer she offers her annual Reading Is Thinking comprehension institute at different locations throughout the country. As a consultant to the National Geographic Society, she serves on the NGS Literacy Council. Stephanie loves to write and has published articles in Language Arts, Instructor, and other educational publications. Her first book, Nonfiction Matters, was published in 1998 by Stenhouse. That was followed by Strategies That Work, written in collaboration with her colleague Anne Goudvis in 2000. In the spring of 2005, Heinemann FirstHand published The Comprehension Toolkit: Language and Lessons for Active Literacy, a resource for reading comprehension instruction.

Recently, Stephanie and Anne have released a number of videos on reading comprehension, including a single tape called Read Write and Talk with a focus on active literacy, a three-tape series for English Language Learners called Reading the World, and Strategic Thinking, a comprehension series aimed at middle-grade readers.

Additionally, Stephanie serves as a consultant to National Geographic School Publishing on the Reading and Writing Workshops, an intermediate-grade comprehension resource for information literacy.

Stephanie lives in Denver with her husband, Edward, and spends her free time hiking, skiing and reading. She has two grown children, Alex and Jessica.