Martin Gardner is the author of more than seventy books on a vast range of topics including "Did Adam & Eve Have Navels?", "Calculus Made Easy", & "The Annotated Alice". He lives in Hendersonville, North Carolina.Harvey "Smokey" Daniels has been a city and suburban classroom teacher and a college professor, and now works as a national consultant and author on literacy education. In language arts, Smokey is known for his pioneering work on student book clubs, as recounted in Literature Circles: Voice and Choice in Book Clubs and Reading Groups, and Minilessons for Literature Circles. His latest bestselling books on content-area literacy are Upstanders, Subjects Matter, Second Edition; Texts… and Lessons for Teaching Literature; Texts and Lessons for Content-Area Reading; Comprehension & Collaboration; and Content-Area Writing. He is also coauthor of Best Practice, Fourth Edition and The Best Practice Video Companion as well as editor of Comprehension Going Forward. Smokey works with elementary and secondary teachers throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe, offering demonstration lessons, workshops, and consulting, with a special focus on creating, sustaining, and renewing student-centered inquiries and discussions of all kinds. Smokey shows colleagues how to simultaneously build students' reading strategies, balance their reading diets, and strengthen the social skills they need to become genuine lifelong readers. Connect with Smokey @smokeylit.
Dr. Marilyn Bizar is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Secondary Education at National-Louis University in Chicago. A former public school teacher, Marilyn collaborates with a network of 12 Chicago public schools, the Best Practice Network, seeking to implement authentic and challenging teaching methods in classrooms. Along with a team of full-time teacher-leaders, the network offers classroom consulting, staff development workshops, and leadership development for teachers, principals and parents. In 1995, Marilyn helped found the Best Practice High School, a 450-student Chicago Public School that demonstrates on a daily basis, that classroom methodology can make a difference for… kids and teachers. Marilyn has co-authored four books, including Methods That Matter with Harvey Daniels, School Leadership in Times of Urban Reform with Rebecca Barr, and Rethinking High School, co-authored with Harvey Daniels and Steve Zemelman, which chronicles the challenges of creating and implementing a new, small high school in Chicago. Marilyn consults and presents in schools and at conferences around the country. She assists schools in examining their high schools for reform and restructuring. Her workshops focus on developing literacy strategies across the curriculum with teaching methods that are learner-centered.