Validation

At the beginning of the semester, most of my students come in and they're self-professed non-readers. Yesterday, one of my students came in with Eleventh Grade Burns by Heather Brewer and said he saw it at Wal-Mart, grabbed it and put in the cart. He and one other student were waiting for me to go get it, but because of the number of books I buy, I try to avoid buying hardcover books. 

Give a kid a book he likes and...

...that conversation was more validating than the Short Cycle Assessment scores that showed that my students made gains over the course of the year.