Kylene Beers Quotes

Nonfiction lets us learn more; fiction lets us be more.

They will need you to put the right books in their hands, book in which they can lose themselves and books in which they can find themselves.

The most rigorous reading is to find what those words on that page mean in our own lives.

Literature enables us to see our world and ourselves more clearly, to understand our lives more fully.

Rigor is not an attribute of a text but rather a characteristic of our behavior with that text.

...the notion of the classroom as an intellectual community gets lost when conference rooms by the principal's office are turned into data rooms - rooms in which walls, floor to ceiling, are covered with test scores of every child in the school - and "Days Until the TEST" banners greet students and parents as they enter the school. That, at the very least, suggests the school is more interested in making sure students pass a test than in creating an intellectual community.

All children in every school deserve an education that inspires curiosity, encourages creativity, requires critical thinking, urges collaboration, and nurtures compassion.

To rethink relevance, to seriously reconsider who is in charge of determining relevance-us or them--means shaking the foundation of a lot of teachers.

In this country, we kept slaves from learning to read. Additionally, for a while in our history, you were adequately literate if you could simply sign your name—or even just make an X. In developing countries today, girls are still educated less than boys. What do these situations suggest about the potential power of reading?

Total irrelevancy, absolute insignificance, and unwavering stasis are effective strategies for avoiding the discomfort of thought and change.

And we will do better with changing the questions we ask of such texts from “What literary device did the author use to reveal conflict?” to “What has changed or challenged your thinking?” The right books with the wrong questions will not move us forward.