Being an author and helping educators around the world empower their students is a dream come true.  With three books published and a fourth on the way, I am thankful for the wisdom from my own students as we try to create better educational experiences around the world.

 Passionate Readers:  The Art of Reaching and Engaging Every Child

How do we inspire students to love reading and discovery?

In Passionate Readers: The Art of Reaching and Engaging Every Child, classroom teacher, author, and speaker Pernille Ripp reveals the five keys to creating a passionate reading environment. You’ll learn how to…

• Use your own reading identity to create powerful reading experiences for all students
• Empower your students and their reading experience by focusing on your physical classroom environment
• Create and maintain an enticing, well-organized, easy-to-use classroom library;
• Build a learning community filled with choice and student ownership; and
• Guide students to further develop their own reading identity to cement them as life-long, invested readers.

Throughout the book, Pernille opens up about her own trials and errors as a teacher and what she’s learned along the way. She also shares a wide variety of practical tools that you can use in your own classroom, including a reader profile sheet, conferring sheet, classroom library letter to parents, and much more.

“Passionate Readers is the perfect title for this helpful book. Pernille manages to teach us how to harness true passion in ways that will transform the readers in our classrooms. It is no small feat to take such large and lofty goals and make them tangible and real for all educators and students, and yet that is what this book offers, with heart and style to boot.”

–Kate Roberts, National Literacy Consultant, Author, and Speaker

“A good professional text is a forever resource. We go back to it time and time again for that just-right lesson or chapter we need to fuel our craft. Passionate Readers moves like that novel you can’t put down. Tucked in between the narrative of Pernille’s five keys and tireless risk-taking in her passionate reading environment are the candid voices of the kids speaking their truths, shining a light on reading identity. Make room for a new forever resource.”

–Sara K. Ahmed, Literacy Coach & Consultant-in-Residence, NIST International School, Thailand

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The official study guide can be found here

Passionate Learners – How to Engage and Empower Your Students to the world!

Doesn’t Every Teacher Dream of a Classroom Full of Passionate Learners?

Breaking the rules can be terrifying within the public school system, no matter how few or many years teachers have taught, I realized this as I started to break the rules myself.

“We are so indoctrinated with how a traditional classroom should look like—from our college years and sometimes years of experience—that when we bring new ideas, or even just trust our instincts, we often think that what we want to try will never really work. ”

“Pressure from districts to conform, from the government to test, and sometimes even from colleagues to just stay the same doesn’t help as we think about changing our practice. Sometimes we give up before we even make the attempt, thinking the barriers and push back will be insurmountable.”

After several years of wondering why my own classroom didn’t match my vision of students driven by curiosity and passion, I discovered that even the smallest changes can make monumental differences. Trusting yourself and your students and sharing the power of the classroom with them can lead to great teaching and learning even within the boundaries of our confining standards, testing obsessions and mandatory curriculums.

In Passionate Learners, I tell you what and how I changed—and how my students changed with me.  We learn about the little and not-so-little things I did over the course of a transformational year so that I could shift the responsibility for learning – the joy and wonder of it – to the kids themselves.

A Review:

In a time when much of education is dictated by curriculum standards and mandated behavior management programs, Pernille offers a fresh perspective on what learning is like from the student perspective. From her asking the question, “would you like being a student in your own classroom?” to her ideas about grading and homework, she offers a vision of truly student-centered education. She does not offer a method or a step-by-step guide to changing one’s teaching. Instead, she empowers teachers to reflect on their experiences, on research, and on their current level of comfort with innovation. After this reflection, teachers are ready to use Pernille’s ideas as a springboard to transform their own classrooms into ones that are truly student-centered.

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Prepare your students to adapt and thrive in the world beyond their classroom. This how-to guide offers strategies for how to establish classrooms that give students globally connected literacy experiences. Learn why students must create school projects aimed at an authentic audience beyond school walls, and plan for more purposeful opportunities for students to engage with what they learn and create. You ll discover how to use readily available technology tools to create environments where students gain 21st century skills, collaborate with others around the globe, and realize that their work matters.

Benefits

• Examine the key features of an authentic global collaboration experience and the benefits of a globally connected classroom.
• Gain tips for creating authentic and successful global collaborative projects.
• Discover what steps you can take immediately to foster global literacy classrooms.
• Consider classroom situations that illustrate the global literacy environment at work.
• Answer reflection questions to contemplate how you will apply the ideas and literacy strategies covered in this book.

A Review:

I highly recommend reading Pernille Ripp’s book if you want to get practical advice for how to help your kids learn from a global perspective. I feel ready and motivated to choose the path that is right for me and for my students so that I can be successful in making my students more aware of the world around them and the kids who live all over the world. One of the best things about this book is that Ripp doesn’t say you need to buy tons of technology, in fact it’s the opposite. She insists it can be done with merely one device, if that’s all you’ve got. The key is relationship building–in your classroom and across the world.

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My second book, “Empowered Schools, Empowered Students – Creating the Connected and Invested Learner”