180 Days: Two Teachers and the Quest to Engage and Empower Adolescents

“Teaching is art—creation—and a curriculum map is only as good as the teacher who considers it, who questions it, and who revises it to meet the needs of each year’s students.” —Kelly Gallagher and Penny Kittle

Two teachers. Two classrooms.
One school year.

180 Days represents the collaboration of two master teachers—Kelly Gallagher and Penny Kittle—over an entire school year: planning, teaching, and reflecting within their own and each other’s classrooms in California and New Hampshire. Inspired by a teacher’s question, “How do you fit it all in?” they identified and prioritized the daily, essential, belief-based practices that are worth spending time on. They asked, “Who will these students be as readers and writers after a year under our care?”

What we make time for matters: what we plan, how we revise our plans while teaching, and how we reflect and decide what’s next. The decision-making in the moment is the most essential work of teaching, and it’s the ongoing study of the adolescents in front of us that has the greatest impact on our thinking.

With both the demands of time and the complexity of diverse students in mind, Kelly and Penny mapped out a year of engaging literacy practices aligned to their core beliefs about what matters most. They share their insights on managing time and tasks and offer teaching strategies for engaging students in both whole class and independent work. Video clips of Kelly and Penny teaching in each other’s classrooms bring this year to life and show you what a steadfast commitment to belief-based instruction looks like in action.

180 Days. Make every moment matter. Teach fearlessly. Empower all students to live literate lives.

Kelly Gallagher (@KellyGToGo) taught at Magnolia High School in Anaheim, California for 35 years. He is the coauthor, with Penny Kittle, of Four Essential Studies: Beliefs and Practices to Reclaim Student Agency, as well as the bestselling 180 Days. Kelly is also the author of several other books on adolescent literacy, most notably Readicide and Write Like This. He is the former co-director of the South Basin Writing Project at California State University, Long Beach and the former president of the Secondary Reading Group for the International Literacy Association.

Penny Kittle teaches freshman composition at Plymouth State University in New Hampshire. She was a teacher and literacy coach in public schools for 34 years, 21 of those spent at Kennett High School in North Conway. She is the co-author (with Kelly Gallagher) of Four Essential Studies: Beliefs and Practices to Reclaim Student Agency as well as the bestselling 180 Days. Penny is the author of Book Love and Write Beside Them, which won the NCTE James Britton award. She also co-authored two books with her mentor, Don Graves, and co-edited (with Tom Newkirk) a collection of Graves' work, Children Want to Write. She is the president of the Book Love Foundation and was given the Exemplary Leader Award from NCTE's Conference on English Leadership. In the summer Penny teaches graduate students at the University of New Hampshire Literacy Institutes. Throughout the year, she travels across the U.S. and Canada (and once in awhile quite a bit farther) speaking to teachers about empowering students through independence in literacy. She believes in curiosity, engagement, and deep thinking in schools for both students and their teachers. Penny stands on the shoulders of her mentors, the Dons (Murray & Graves), and the Toms (Newkirk & Romano), in her belief that intentional teaching in a reading and writing workshop brings the greatest student investment and learning in a classroom. Learn more about Penny Kittle on her websites, pennykittle.net and booklovefoundation.org, or follow her on twitter. Penny's students make a statement about how student choice in reading has affected them.