Conversation and Collaboration Engage Literacy Learners

Karen Biggs-Tucker is a fifth-grade teacher in St. Charles, Illinois. Her passions include sitting alongside her students and listening to them converse about their literacy experiences. Over the course of her career, one of the biggest shifts in her classroom practice has been building in moments of collaboration for students throughout the day. It is one of the most powerful ways they learn from each other, and one of the ways she learns from them and about them as learners. She is the coauthor of two books about literacy, Transforming Literacy Teaching for the Common Core and The Literacy Workshop: Where Reading and Writing Converge. She is currently working on Everyday Reading: 99 Use Tomorrow Ideas for Today’s Literacy Learners, offering practical ways to engage students with authentic reading, writing, and conversation about their literacy lives. She’d love to hear about what you do to engage readers and writers in your classroom communities. She can be reached at karen.biggs-tucker@d303.org.