Carol Jago

Carol Jago

Carol Jago taught English in middle and high school for more than 30 years and is a popular speaker at national education conferences. She is a past president of the National Council of Teachers of English, and serves as an associate director of the California Reading and Literature Project at UCLA.

Jago has always been an avid reader and has spent more than 30 years sharing her passion for books with students.

Student writers need better writing prompts that challenge them to do research and gather important details.

Jago believes that literature helps you to understand the human condition and where your place is in this world.

Jago explains what a good teacher can do to teach complex books and build reading rigor.

Jago discusses the difference between readability and Lexile levels versus true text complexity.

Jago reminds us that strategies represent the things that good readers do all the time.

Readers need to bring the best “habits” to different genres.

Jago thinks that pairing a text with visuals such as paintings or photographs gives students a new way to interpret the meaning of the text.

Jago says, “The whole story is made up of a lot of different stories. And right now many students are not hearing those other stories.”

With writing, you can start small, just by getting something down on paper.

Jago shares her own rough drafts with students to let them know that all writers need to revise, get feedback, and revise again.

Jago says that if you write, you can enter into a fascinating dialogue with others and become part of the public discourse.

Teachers need to learn what to do that actually makes a difference for student writers rather than just perfectly correcting papers.

Teachers should provide more time in class for revising and help the students take ownership of their drafts as they recognize what they want to change in their writing.

How can teachers help students learn to argue, learn to offer evidence for claims that they are making, and listen to other people’s point of view?

Biography

Carol Jago taught English in middle and high school for more than 30 years, is a past president of the National Council of Teachers of English, and serves as an associate director of the California Reading and Literature Project at UCLA.

She works with schools and districts to craft professional development programs that both meets local needs and is standards-aligned. Jago has helped design school-wide, cross-curricular writing programs as well as benchmark expectations and assessments for reading and writing.

Jago served as AP Literature content advisor for the College Board and has published six books for teachers with Heinemann. She is an author on the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Collections program for English Language Arts grades 6-12 as well as a consultant for the HMH Journeys program. She has also published  books on contemporary multicultural authors for NCTE’s High School Literature series.

Jago has written a weekly education column for the Los Angeles Times, and her essays have appeared in English Journal, Language Arts, NEA Today, as well as in other newspapers across the nation. She edits the journal of the California Association of Teachers of English, California English, and served on the planning committee for the 2009 NAEP Reading Framework and the 2011 NAEP Writing Framework.

Learn more at Carol Jago’s official website.

Books by this author

With Rigor for All: Meeting Common Core Standards for Reading Literature (Second Edition)

With Rigor for All: Meeting Common Core Standards for Reading Literature (Second Edition)

Carol Jago
Age Level:
Adult
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