Adolescent Literacy & Boy Writers 2 Books, 2 Formats, ONE Question... How can we get our kids to read and write and keep them reading and writing is spite of the road blocks? Project Write Contributing Researchers – Jill Campbell, Leslie Yats, Susan Wolverton, and Vicki Edwards

Robert E. Probst, “Tom Sawyer,Teaching and Talking,” from Adolescent Literacy provides ideas for teaching kids how to ‘talk’ about what they know from what they read. One terrific idea was the ‘Dialogue Book’. 1. Why did the author, _______ choose to focus on the struggles and challenges of teaching young boy writers? 2. What are some ways that the author suggests to bridge the gap between writing for school and writing for ‘life’? 3. As you read the book were you more conscious of what you know and how you feel about boys and their approaches to writing? 4. Were there personal experiences that came to mind as you read? Probst offers a list of questions for creating student dialogue books on page 55. Dialogue books provide a tool that can add needed structure to group discussions. Probst also shares a helpful rubric for assessing student discussions. Very Cool! We drew from the Probst article to structure our own ‘book talk’ about Boy Writers. These were some of the questions that we felt would be good ones to embellish a dialogue about the book. What would you suggest?

To add to the value of this strategy, we suggest you consider questions from the following categories: 1. Ask questions that require students to draw upon their own stories (experiences). 2. Ask questions that require students to compare character traits, abilities, strengths and attitudes that they share with either the main theme of the text or with a character in the text. 3. Ask students to generate their own questions based on what they know about the text.