About the Author

Nancie Atwell is one of the most highly respected educators in the U.S. and across the world. She is the winner of the Varkey Foundation's inaugural Global Teacher Prize. She has dedicated the entire $1 million award to the Center for Teaching and Learning, the demonstration school she founded in 1990. Nancie's classic In the Middle, now in its third edition, has inspired generations of teachers and shares her teaching journey and the practices she's developed that led to her nomination. Visit Heinemann.com/InTheMiddle for more about the book and Nancie. Systems to Transform Your Classroom and School takes you inside her school to see what innovations have made the biggest impact on learning schoolwide, while her DVDs Writing in the Middle and Reading in the Middle give us a seat in her writing and reading workshops to see firsthand how she helps students become independent, sophisticated readers and writers. Nancie is also the author of classroom materials through Firsthand. Lessons that Change Writers is a year's worth of instruction straight from Nancie's file cabinets, while Naming the World helps teachers jumpstart their literacy teaching each day the way Nancie does - with poetry, the mother genre. Nancie teaches seventh- and eighth-grade writing, reading, and history at the Center for Teaching and Learning, a K - 8 demonstration school she founded in Edgecomb, Maine. Nancie was the first classroom teacher to receive the NCTE David H. Russell Award and the MLA Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize for distinguished research in the teaching of English. Nancie was recently named 2010 Teacher of the Year by River of Words; a California-based non-profit educational organization and also received an honorary degree from the University of New Hampshire during its 2011 commencement ceremony. Read Nancie's Education Week article in which she makes the case for literature in the core standards. To see and hear Nancie's response to the NY Times article on the place of student choice in reading, click here. Read the Article