Episode #100: Empowering Striving Readers and Writers with Laura Robb

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Laura Robb, an author, teacher, coach, and speaker who has completed more than 43 years of teaching in grades 4-8 and has written more than 25 books for teachers. She presently coaches teachers in reading/writing workshops at Powhatan School in Virginia and coaches teachers in grades K-8 in Staunton, Virginia, Long Island, and Ann Arbor, Michigan, and West Nyack, New York. Her latest books that she wrote with Evan Robb (her son) are TeamMakers and School Full of Readers.

Your background 

I came to teaching very unexpectedly. I never had any education classes when I went to Queens College as part of the University of New York. I majored in English and French Lit and then got married. My husband, a singer, and a voice instructor went to Julliard which was expensive even on a scholarship. I was writing copy for an ad agency in the city and then I got a job teaching without an educational background. That’s when I realized that the best teachers were the children. If I had the courage to ask them what was going well and what was going wrong to find out what they needed, I was learning and growing. I began to read a lot of professional books for teachers. That first year I taught sixth grade in a little country school, it won my heart. That’s when the story of my life really began.

Your work now as a reading teacher and coach

For the last four years, my focus is to work with kids in the public schools who are reading 3 or more years below grade level. My first year of teaching was in 1963. I did not get a master’s in education until 1987. I had both of my children, Evan, and my daughter, Enina who did teaching with Teach for America. I decided that my children had to be my number one priority. Self-learning is more important than ever. I’m glad I got my master’s but I would say my children taught me a lot and they still do every day. 

What was fortunate for me, was my granddaughter, who was dyslexic asked me to work with her. In third grade, she was reading at a first-grade level. She was relentless about me making up the work with her. She’s now in 7th grade and she’s in a regular English class. When she was in 5th grade, she asked me to help her friends who were not reading well. I made an appointment with her principal and found that a third of the students were reading way below grade level. I made an agreement with the principal as long as we were not going to grade these kids unless you give them As or Bs with a qualifier and we need a lot of money for books they can read. The kids need books and they need choice. We got them and it made such a difference with the teachers I trained who are doing phenomenal work. 

It all starts with choice, reading, and feeling safe in that classroom. Kids were worried about other kids making fun of them. We got them opaque envelopes to take home books. We waited until they could choose and take books home that they really enjoyed. 

You cannot force things on children. It has to come from deep inside. When it does, it’s lasting. Reading is an intervention. If we want kids to be readers, they have to want to read. They need to have books they can read all day long. We need to be able to read together. We started every day with 15 minutes of independent reading. When we were in session, you would see kids pick a book, find a comfortable place to read, then silence and reading. Books make a difference.

A few of Laura’s Books

[This is Barbara. Laura shares strategies for intervention and to provide choices for books that make sense for each child. I learned so much from Laura that I hope you listen to the whole podcast and check out her books.]

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Laura Robb is a keynote and featured speaker at conferences and leads workshops all over the country and in Canada. She writes articles for education journals. Her blog for MiddleWeb, “Our # 1 Reading Problem: Persistent Inequalities†was published in April 2014, another MiddleWeb Blog was published in March 2016, “Ten Motivators to Promote Playful Learning.â€Â  Her blog published by MiddleWeb: “ Democracy Needs a Nation of Readers & Thinkers.â€Â 

Laura Robb has written more than 25 books for teachers. In 2016, two books were published: Reading Intervention Toolkit by Shell Education in April 2016 and Read Talk Write: 35 Lessons That Teach Students to Analyze Fiction and Nonfiction published by Corwin Literacy in 2017. Corwin Literacy also published Robb’s Vocabulary Is Comprehension: Getting to the Root of Complex Texts was available in 2014.  Her book for Heinemann is a First-Hand Curriculum: Smart Writing: Practical Units For Teaching Middle School Writers and a book, and a professional book, Teaching Middle School Writers: What Every English Teacher Needs to Know. For Scholastic, Robb has completed Unlocking Complex Texts; the book provides teachers with detailed reading and writing about reading lessons.  Robb has designed classroom libraries for Scholastic for grades 3 to 9. She developed, with Jeff Wilhelm, XBOOKS for middle school readers: nonfiction print texts with an online curriculum organized by themes such as forensics, tyrants, war, medicine, and strange.

Her latest books are TeamMakers and School Full of Readers that she co-authored with her son, Evan Robb. 

Laura’s Contact information

Twitter: @LRobbTeacher

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/laura-robb-b2b6491b

Website: http://www.lrobb.com/ 

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