Acknowledgements

First and foremost, I am grateful to Helen Maniates, my adviser at the University of San Francisco and director of the Masters in Teaching Reading at the University of San Francisco, for her tremendous guidance. She is a role model for what I strive to be as a teacher: knowledgeable, creative and compassionate. I am also grateful to each and every teacher I visited and all the scholars I interviewed for this project. I am particularly grateful to David Pearson, Claude Goldenberg, Fredricka Stoller, Sedique Popal, Sarah Bracken and Cynthia Greenleaf for sharing their resources, time and expertise.

I want to thank my husband, Stuart Wenzel, my kids, Teo and Mikaela, and my dad, Don Schmidt, for supporting me in countless ways during my sabbatical. Many thanks to Melinda Sarafa for copy editing assistance, Hali Lee and Lillian Oshva for hosting me when I visited schools in New York, Ritu Bansal for taking Mikaela on outings when I attended TESOL, and Kate Parker, Barbara Duhl, Monique Parsons, Sylvia Lee, and Julie Barton for reading drafts of the content for this website. I also want to thank my classmates from USF from whom I learned through our many collaborative activities in our classes together. Many thanks to Dr. Sedique Popal, one of the most energetic, passionate and organized educators I know. Thank you to Eileen Lai for technical support as I learned to create a website.

Lastly, I want to thank the Sequoia Union High School District for approving my sabbatical proposal. I hope that the new insights I have gained during my sabbatical will result in increased achievement and engagement of my students and contribute meaningfully to the knowledge base of the educators in our district.