Mindsets and Moves: Strategies That Help Readers Take Charge [Grades K-8]

What if you could have an owner’s manual on reading ownership? What if there really were a framework for building students’ agency and independence? 

There’s no “what if?” about it. When it comes to teaching reading, Gravity Goldberg declares there is a structure, one that works with your current curriculum, to help readers take charge. The way forward Gravity says lies in admiring, studying, and really getting to know your students.

Consider Mindsets & Moves your guide. Here, Gravity describes how to let go of our default roles of assigner, monitor, and manager and instead shift to a growth mindset. Easily replicable in any setting, any time, her 4 Ms framework ultimately lightens your load because they allow students to monitor and direct their reading lives. 

1. Miner: Uncovering Students’ Reading Processes (Focus: Assessment)
2. Mirror: Giving Feedback That Reinforces a Growth Mindset (Focus: Feedback)
3. Model: Showing Readers What We Do (Focus: Demonstration]
4. Mentor: Guiding Students to Try New Ways of Reading (Focus: Guided Practice and Coaching)

Get started on the 4Ms tomorrow! Gravity has loaded the book with practical examples, lessons, reading process and strategy lists, and a 35-page photo tour of exemplary reading classrooms with captions that distill best practices. All figures, student work and photographs are provided in vibrant, full color. 

We are in the midst of an ownership crisis, and readers of every ability and in every grade are more often compliant than fully engaged. Use Mindsets & Moves as that rare resource that 
makes something highly complex suddenly clear and inspiring for you. 


GRAVITY GOLDBERG is coauthor of Conferring with Readers: Supporting Each Students’ Growth and Independence (Heinemann, 2007) and author of many articles about reading, writing, and professional development. She holds a doctorate in education from Teachers College, Columbia University. She is a former staff developer at Teachers College Reading and Writing Project and an assistant professor at Iona College’s graduate education program. She leads a team of literacy consultants in the New York/New Jersey region. 

“Mindsets and Moves addresses, in a very engaging way, the most important aspects of classroom literacy instruction. It shows how to think about and interact with children around literacy. Thoroughly grounded in current theories, which are clearly explained and illustrated with stories and examples, the book is absolutely practical with excellent examples of lessons, anchor charts and all of the necessary details.” — Peter Johnston, Author of Choice Words and Opening Minds