Every once in a while—and not often enough—a professional book comes along that has such a profound impact on your classroom practice you’re left wondering how you were able to survive so long without it.

It’s about to happen again: that “where-have-you-been-all-my-life” feeling. With Nancy Akhavan’s Nonfiction NOW Lesson Bank.

What exactly makes this book such a stand-out? Instead of talking around the Common Core—or around what it means to read nonfiction well—it gets to the heart of showing you just how to teach content-area texts for slower, deeper, and more purposeful reading and understanding.

If you consider the number of lessons, reproducibles, and ready-to-use informational texts, that alone is a pretty hefty sum of resources to transform teaching. But Nancy happens to be an educator who has performed many roles over her career so she divests in this book just about everything in her professional vault, presenting a whole-new vision for your nonfiction instruction.

Step by step—and before, during, and after reading—The Nonfiction Now Lesson Bank provides:

• 50 powerhouse lessons on teaching nonfiction, including five on close reading
• A bank of short informational texts to use with lessons
• Student practice activities on everything from scanning features to writing about reading
• Graphic organizers for taming textbooks
• The Daily Duo sequence for weekly lesson and unit planning

Some professional books live their lives on shelves. The Nonfiction NOW Lesson Bank will live its life in actual use: dog-eared, sticky-noted, and loved.

A former teacher, staff developer,  principal, and assistant superintendent, Nancy Akhavan is currently Assistant Professor and Single Subject Credential Coordinator at California State University, Fresno. Her areas of expertise are broad—literacy, reading and writing instruction, content-based reading instruction, standards-based instruction, English language learners, and leadership—in both urban and rural settings.

“When you read this book what shines through is: Nancy is a teacher. Only a teacher would know that this is just-the-right book for teachers, right now. Right now, with the pressures to help kids read more and more complex texts, Akhavan has a solution that is sensible. . . . Now, just as it’s always been, it’s about comprehension.”
—Jennifer Serravallo, Author of The Literacy Teacher’s Playbook