Pat R. Scales

As promised by the title, this book contains 12 strategies to use when working with middle school students. The first strategy pertains to studying the First Amendment; the remaining 11 are about particular books, specifically books that have been challenged or considered controversial because they cover topics like racism, death, etc. Each strategy comes with a brief summary, ideas for related activities to further explore the concepts, deep discussion questions, and annotated bibliographies of other novels (and occasionally also nonfiction books) on similar topics for further reading. All in all, this seems like a useful book for junior high school teachers, although less useful for librarians (despite the author being a school librarian and the book being published by the American Library Association). One downside is that the strategies all cover books that are rather old (several were books I had read in middle school), and even the books mentioned in the bibliographies weren't all that recently published. It's not bad to appreciate the "oldies but goodies" but it would be nice to have an update of more contemporary works that kids are reading right now.… (más)