Jeffrey Wilhelm is a well-known teacher, author, and presenter. 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 studied adolescent boys and their reading, attitudes, aspirations, and the school opportunities available to them 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. 

A classroom teacher for fifteen years, Dr. Jeffrey Wilhelm is currently a professor at the Boise State University, where he teaches courses in middle and secondary level literacy. He works in local schools as part of the Professional Development Site Network (PDSN). He is the founding director of the Maine Writing Project and the Boise State writing project.

Dr. Wilhelm’s book Standards in Practice: Grades 6–8 was released by both NCTE and IRA as an addendum to the national standards. He has published two books based on his dissertation, “Developing Readers: Teaching Engaged and Reflective Reading with Adolescents”: You Gotta BE the Book (Teachers College Press and NCTE), for which he won the NCTE Promising research award, and Imagining to Learn: Drama Across the Curriculum, coauthored with Brian Edmiston (Heinemann). Hyperlearning: Where Inquiry, Literacy and Technology Meet was published by Stenhouse Publishers in 1998. He and two PDSN 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 (Heinemann). The provocative findings of his study on boys and literacy achievement are published in Reading Don’t Fix No Chevys: The Role of Literacy in the Lives of Young Men (coauthored with Michael Smith, Heinemann Publishers) and Going With the Flow: How to Engage Boys (and Girls) in Their Literacy Learning. This study won the NCTE’s David H. Russell Award for Distinguished Research in English Education. 

Dr. Wilhelm is the author or coauthor of 15 books on literacy and teaching. Among these, are: Improving Comprehension with Think Alouds: Modeling What Good Readers Do; Action Strategies for Deepening Comprehension; and Reading IS Seeing. His fourth book, published in October 2006, is entitled Engaging Readers and Writers With Inquiry.

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

To view Jeffrey Wilhelm’s bio as a pdf, click here.