Background Information

For the past 27 years, Cris Tovani has taught grades 1-12 in the Cherry Creek School District in Colorado. While teaching elementary instruction, she was disturbed by the number of students that did not know how to read. By conducting research with coworkers throughout the 1980s, Tovani was able to create strategies that could help her students read and excel in the classroom. Today, she consults on staff development for the Denver-based Public Education and Business Coalition (PEBC), an institution that has received national recognition for its work in reading comprehension reform. She is also an adjunct professor for the University of Denver and the University of Colorado at Denver. She is a major advocate of Literacy Labs (workshops for reading comprehension), and collaborates online with fellow teacher and writer Samantha Bennett to teach educators how to create and implement "lab classrooms." You can visit their site at http://www.literacylabs.org/.  Tovani's methods are inspired by many different fields of educational research, from revolutionaries in the field like Vygotsky, to modern researchers like Wiggins and McTighe. Though Tovani uses literacy ideology that is familiar to many educators, she implements this ideology through practical creative strategies that every teacher can use.