Picking Up Where Our Book Ends

So. My good friend and colleague Lisa over at U of A and I are getting a book about young adult literature published by NCTE this fall (we're so excited!). The book was originally titled Not Just for Independent Reading Anymore: Teaching Young Adult Literature to the Whole Class through Differentiated Instruction. But our lovely editor said a wise marketing decision would be to shorten the title to Teaching YA Lit through Differentiated Instruction. Definitely shorter, but I'm not thrilled with it. The whole impetus for our book is to encourage English/language arts teachers to pull young adult literature (and adolescents' out-of-school lives) from the margins of classroom activity. Traditionally, young adult literature has been used for silent, independent reading or in small-group literature circle activities. Rarely--despite the sophistication of YA lit, and appeal to teen readers--is the young adult novel used in whole-class instruction. The YA novel is just not taken seriously by many English teachers, but we think it should be. We think it deserves careful literary study in the classroom. Not every YA novel, granted, but there are definitely a lot of great YA novels being published right now that deserve teachers' attention.

The book (coming out this fall from NCTE, in case you didn't catch that) will give teachers our pick of the best YA literature published since 2000. We provide a rationale to use for judging "quality" YA lit, and we provide differentiated reading strategies for teachers to consider when using the YA novels in whole-class instruction. It's a jam-packed book. We're excited about it (in case you didn't catch that, either).

This blog will pick up where the book leaves off. We get to keep our title, while you get to hear about more great YA novels! We (and other contributors) will continue to provide our top picks of good, contemporary YA lit for classroom instruction, and strategy ideas. We'll also wax poetic now and then about trends we see occurring in the genre. We hope to be a resource for teachers, as we continue to advocate for the use of YA lit in the classroom. Happy reading!