Comprehension and Collaboration: Inquiry Circles for Curiosity, Engagement, and Understanding

• Meet the standards.
• Celebrate kids’ curiosity and questions.
• Cover the curriculum.
• Reach and include everyone.
• Grow resourceful, engaged citizens.
• Seriously?

With inquiry circles, you seriously can—and Stephanie Harvey and Smokey Daniels can’t wait to show you how.

“Educators around the country,” Steph and Smokey write, “are discovering that inquiry is the secret opportunity offered by new national and state standards.” Their Comprehension & Collaboration, Revised Edition, is your end-to-end guide to small-group inquiry projects that work.

Successful inquiry isn’t simply sticking five kids together and telling them to research a topic. So Steph and Smokey share four kinds of inquiry units of increasing richness with all the teaching and planning resources you need. From preparing students for active learning and effective collaboration through assessment and evaluation, Comprehension & Collaboration, Revised Edition, gives you more of what teachers nationwide loved about the first edition:

• 37 strategy lessons, including 11 completely new ones, for thinking and collaboration
• 7 new step-by-step classroom stories that model inquiry-based units
• Groundbreaking research in comprehension, collaboration, and inquiry
• Connections to inquiry structures such as makers, design thinking, genius hour, and capstone projects
• Tips on common questions about management and accountability
• A completely rewritten chapter on the wise use of technology
• Specific correlations from inquiry circles to common state and national standards.

Talk-and-test may seem easier or less messy, but it can’t meet the demands on today’s teachers. That’s why the time for inquiry is now and why now is the time for Comprehension & Collaboration, Revised Edition. Because as Steph and Smokey write, “It is only through highly engaging, experiential, and deeply supportive pedagogy that we can meet lofty standards and prepare kids for high-stakes tests—but also grow curious, lifelong learners.”

Stephanie Harvey has spent her career teaching and learning about reading and writing. After fifteen years of public school teaching, both in regular education and special education classrooms, Stephanie worked for twelve years as 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. Insatiably curious about student thinking, she is a teacher first and foremost and currently serves as a private literacy consultant to schools and school districts. In that role, she conducts keynote speeches, presentations, workshops, demonstration lessons, coaching sessions and ongoing consultation to teachers, reading specialists, literacy coaches, principals and district administrators. With a focus on K-12 literacy, her specialties include comprehension instruction, inquiry-based learning, content area reading and writing, nonfiction literacy, and the role of passion, wonder and engagement in teaching and learning. Stephanie has written many articles, books and resources; her Heinemann publications include the title Comprehension and Collaboration which she co-authored with Smokey Daniels, and The Comprehension Toolkit series which is an in-depth Curricular Resource for comprehension instruction co-authored with Anne Goudvis. Click here to read recent Heinemann Blogs from Steph. Connect with Steph at @StephHarvey49 » Listen to an interview with Stephanie Harvey on Education Talk Radio - 2/29/2012 (30:35)

Harvey "Smokey" Daniels has been a city and suburban classroom teacher and a college professor, and now works as a national consultant and author on literacy education. In language arts, Smokey is known for his pioneering work on student book clubs, as recounted in Literature Circles: Voice and Choice in Book Clubs and Reading Groups, and Minilessons for Literature Circles. His latest bestselling books on content-area literacy are The Curious Classroom; Comprehension & Collaboration, Second Edition; Upstanders; Subjects Matter, Second Edition; the Texts and Lessons series; and Content-Area Writing. He is also coauthor of Best Practice, Fourth Edition, and The Best Practice Video Companion as well as editor of Comprehension Going Forward. Smokey works with elementary and secondary teachers throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe, offering demonstration lessons, workshops, and consulting, with a special focus on creating, sustaining, and renewing student-centered inquiries and discussions of all kinds. Smokey shows colleagues how to simultaneously build students' reading strategies, balance their reading diets, and strengthen the social skills they need to become genuine lifelong readers. Connect with Smokey @smokeylit. READING Comprehension Going Forward Mini-lessons for Literature Circles Subjects Matter, Second Edition Texts and Lessons for Content-Area Reading Texts and Lessons for Teaching Literature WRITING Community of Writers Content-Area Writing LITERACY The Curious Classroom Comprehension & Collaboration, Second Edition Inquiry Circles for Elementary Classrooms Inquiry Circles for Secondary Classrooms SCHOOL CULTURE Best Practice, Fourth Edition Best Practice Video Companion Rethinking High School Rethinking High School Video Upstanders