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 eighteen 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, and a professor of literacy education for another fifteen years. His 
interests include team teaching, co-constructing
inquiry-driven curriculum with students, and pursuing teacher research.
His research agenda includes studying how student reading,
writing, and thinking can be supported through the use of art, drama,
and technology. He has studied 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 a 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
Adolescent Literacy project and a new Professional Development Site Network.
He is the founding director of the Maine Writing Project and the Boise State Writing Project, now in its 8th year.
Jeff has authored or co-authored twenty books about literacy and literacy teaching, including his book Standards in Practice: Grades 6-8 released by both NCTE and IRA as an addendum to the national
standards and has proven to be a best seller. He was the
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 are based on this research: You Gotta BE the Book published by Teachers College Press and NCTE; and 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). The follow up intervention studies are reported on in Going with the Flow (Heinemann). Jeff has composed 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. The fourth is Engaging Readers and Writers with Inquiry.
Jeff has also worked on several series of books for students, including THE TEN, and XBOOKS, distributed by Scholastic, and on several programs of instructional materials for students.
His newest book is TEACHING FOR LOVE AND WISDOM: FROM BEING THE BOOK TO BEING THE CHANGE is coming out in summer 2011 from Teachers College Press, co-published by NWP and NCTE.
He is currently completing a study on students who are passionate readers of texts typically marginalized by schools, tentatively entitled LET THEM READ TRASH.
With colleagues Jim Fredricksen and Michael Smith, Jeff is writing a series of three books for Heinemann on meeting the Common Core State Standards for the reading and composing of narrative, expository, and argumentative texts.
He enjoys speaking, presenting, working with students and schools.
To learn more about Jeff, visit his website.