Jeffrey Wilhelm, Ph.D., is an internationally-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, Jeffrey Wilhelm is currently Professor of English Education at 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, and teaches middle and high school students each spring. He is the founding director of the Maine Writing Project and the Boise State Writing Project. Jeff enjoys speaking, presenting, and working with students and teachers.
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), and Imagining to Learn: Drama Across the Curriculum, co-authored with Brian Edmiston (Heinemann). Hyperlearning: Where Inquiry, Literacy and Technology Meet was published by Stenhouse Publishers in 1998. He and two PDS 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 (co-authored with Michael Smith, Heinemann Publishers). This study won the NCTE’s David H. Russell Award for Distinguished Research in English Education. A follow up study exploring how to put the implications of the research into practice is entitled Going With the Flow: Teaching for Literacy and for Life
Jeff has written a series of books for Scholastic Professional Books that explore the teaching implications of his various studies on reading. The first four books have been published over the past four years: Improving Comprehension with Think-Aloud Strategies, Action Strategies for Deepening Comprehension, Reading IS Seeing, and Engaging Readers & Writers with Inquiry. A fifth with coauthor Michael Smith, Getting it Right: Teaching Grammar and Language Usage So It Matters, is currently in production.