Gwen Pauloski, Teacher, Researcher, Consultant, and Author, discusses her new book, Making Deep Sense of Informational Text, in an interview conducted by Dr. Sam Bommarito.
I’ve been on hiatus now for over a month due to some health issues. Things are much better now and Dr. Sam is back! This is the first of several posts I’ve gotten ready. By the way, the next one will be about a new book by Dr. Claudine Kizart. It is about social justice.
Dr. Gwen Paulski is a teacher, researcher, consultant, and author. It’s not often that you find a person who has a clear-cut, compelling background in each of those roles. A review of her biography and interview in the next sections of this blog provides ample evidence that Dr. Gwen Pauloski is clearly such a person. Like many intermediate and secondary teachers, Gwen has been on a lifelong quest to find things that can motivate adolescent readers to read and also to make sense of what they read. To help in that quest, Gwen not only reviewed the research but also contributed to it with articles of her own. She eventually used all the things she learned in her teaching to complete a Doctoral Thesis. Her new book’s audience is her fellow teachers. For many of them, the what and how to teach adolescent readers has been a Gordian knot. I think teachers will find Gwen offers some practical solutions that will help them help the kids. Her consultant work shines through as the book explains what teachers can do and why they should do it. Her story tells how she helped students who lacked confidence in their reading, become readers and critical thinkers. Before discussing that, let’s take a look at her biography and interview.
BIOGRAPHY
Here are the timed stamped talking points for the interview (so, you can go to the sections that interest you the most first)
Here is a link to the U-Tube Interview:
Here is a link to Gwen’s Book:
Here is a link to Gwen’s Web Page:
Final Thoughts
Due to Gwen’s unique background, she has a wealth of knowledge to share with her fellow teachers. Her seventeen-plus years as a social studies teacher and nine years spent coaching teachers and principals mean she knows the nuts and bolts of teaching adolescents and knows how to address the concerns of those who work with them. Having someone as well-known in the field as Cris Tovani write the forward to her book is a clear indication that Gwen really knows her stuff and that her stuff is worth learning about. I strongly recommend that my readers take the time to visit and carefully examine Gwen’s web page LINK. There, you can learn about her pedagogy and discover the strategies she believes are worth teaching. If you like what you find there, you could then consider adding her new book to your go-to resources LINK.
For those of you who might have doubts about taking the time to teach reading strategies, please review the work of Dr. Tim Rasinski LINK, LINK, LINK. Please examine his slide about the effect sizes of various components of the reading process. He included the slide below in his keynote at last year’s Lit Con conference:
There is a considerable effect size for word recognition. However, there are even larger effect sizes for the bridging processes like reading fluency and language comprehension processes. We need folks like Dr. Gwen Paulski to remind us that comprehension strategies can be, and should be, taught. We need folks like Dr. Tim Rasinski to show us ways to use fluency development to help build orthographic knowledge. That doesn’t mean doing these things instead of word recognition. It means doing them in addition to word recognition. Dare to dream!
Happy Reading and Writing,
Dr. Sam Bommarito (aka, the guy in the center taking flak from all sides)
Copyright 2025 by Dr. Sam Bommarito. Views/interpretations expressed here are solely this author’s views and do not necessarily reflect the views of any other person or organization.
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