Jeff's Biography

Jeffrey Wilhelm enjoys living on the edge where he is often in danger of falling off! He even eats anchovies on his pizzas. The chief delights of his life are his wife and two daughters, followed (but not too closely!) by reading, immersing himself in the arts (jazz music, dance, movies), bicycling, marathon cross-country skiing (he has finished eleven Birkebeiner ski marathons and several other marathons from the Worldloppet circuit!) basketball, writing, backpacking, canoeing and other adventurous outdoor pursuits.

Professionally, Jeff has been a teacher of reading and the language arts at the middle and secondary school levels for fifteen years. His interests include team teaching, co-constructing inquiry-driven curriculum with students, and pursuing teacher research. His recent research agenda includes studying how student reading, writing, and thinking can be supported through the use of art, drama, and technology. Most recently, he is studying adolescent boys and their reading, their attitudes and aspirations, and the opportunities available to them inside and outside of school for actualizing and performing different ways of being literate. He is particularly interested in supporting the learning of students who are often considered to be reluctant or resistant.

Jeff is currently an associate professor of English at Boise State University where he teaches courses in middle and secondary level literacy. He works in local schools as part of the Adolescent Literacy project and a new Professional Development Network. He is currently engaged in founding a new National Writing Project site at Boise State University.

His book Standards in Practice: Grades 6-8 was released by both NCTE and IRA as an addendum to the national standards and has proven to be a best seller. He is the recent recipient of the NCTE Promising Researcher Award (1995) for his dissertation entitled Developing Readers: Teaching Engaged and Reflective Reading with Adolescents. Two books for teachers, based on this research, have been published: You Gotta BE the Book is published by Teachers College Press and NCTE; Imagining to Learn: Drama Across the Curriculum, is co-authored with Brian Edmiston and published by Heinemann. Hyperlearning: Where Inquiry, Literacy and Technology Meet, with Stenhouse publishers, was published in the Summer of 1998. He and two PDN teachers, Tanya Baker and Julie Dube, have published the implications of several of their teacher research studies in Strategic Reading: Guiding Students to Lifelong Literacy, 6-12 (Heine! mann). He recently completed a major study on boys and literacy with Michael Smith which has won the David H. Russell Award for Distinguished Research in English Education. Their provocative findings are published in "Reading Don’t Fix No Chevys": the Role of Literacy in the Lives of Young Men (Heinemann Publishers). Jeff is now writing a series of books for Scholastic that explore the teaching implications of his various studies on reading. The first is Improving Comprehension with Think Aloud Strategies: Modeling What Good Readers Do, the second is Action Strategies for Deepening Comprehension: Role Play, Hotseat, Text Structure Tableaux and other Enactment Strategies, the third is Reading IS Seeing: Using Visual Strategies to Engage and Assist Readers, all from Scholastic Books.

He enjoys speaking, presenting, working with students and schools.