Kate Roberts – författare

As an English teacher, Kate Roberts has seen the power of whole-class novels to build community in her classroom. But she’s also seen too many kids struggle too much to read them—and consequently, check out of reading altogether. Kate’s had better success getting kids to actually read—and enjoy it—when they choose their own books within a workshop model. “And yet,” she says, “I missed my whole-class novels.”

In A Novel Approach, Kate takes a deep dive into the troubles and triumphs of both whole-class novels and independent reading and arrives at a persuasive conclusion: we can find a student-centered, balanced approach to teaching reading. Kate offers a practical framework for creating units that join both teaching methods together and helps you:

Identify the skills your students need to learn

Choose whole-class texts that will be most relevant to your kids

Map out the timing of a unit and the strategies you’ll teach

Meet individual needs while teaching whole novels

Guide students to choice books and book clubs that build on the skills being taught.

Above all, Kate’s plan emphasizes teaching reading skills and strategies over the books themselves. “By making sure that our classes are structured in a way that really sees students and strives to meet their needs,” she argues, “we can keep reaching for the dream of a class where no student is unmoved, no reader unchanged by the end of the year.” Video clips of Kate working with students in diverse classrooms bring the content to life throughout the book.

If you’re reading this, you probably have a unit plan nearby—stuffed in a binder, buried in a shared drive, or gleaming from a fresh box of published curriculum. There’s solid content in there. Maybe even great content. But if you’ve found your way to this book, something isn’t lining up: the work doesn’t fit your students, gaps remain, or last year’s units didn’t deliver.

All too often, curriculum shortfalls are chalked up to implementation. But in Unboxing the Curriculum, author Kate Roberts, with Maggie Beattie Roberts, argues that it’s often the road map that needs some work. The path doesn’t lead where it should, and sometimes, there be dragons.

This book offers a field guide for charting a better course through unit planning. In its pages, you’ll learn to:

With real classroom examples and team-friendly protocols that apply to any subject, grade level, or program alongside a robust appendix full of practical use-tomorrow tools, you’ll navigate prepackaged or scripted curricula and prewritten units without losing sight of the students in front of you. The result? A path learners can take to their destination.

Like a map well marked, Unboxing the Curriculum plots a direct route through mandates and box sets right to the hearts of the students in front of you.

If you’re reading this, you probably have a unit plan nearby—stuffed in a binder, buried in a shared drive, or gleaming from a fresh box of published curriculum. There’s solid content in there. Maybe even great content. But if you’ve found your way to this book, something isn’t lining up: the work doesn’t fit your students, gaps remain, or last year’s units didn’t deliver.

All too often, curriculum shortfalls are chalked up to implementation. But in Unboxing the Curriculum, author Kate Roberts, with Maggie Beattie Roberts, argues that it’s often the road map that needs some work. The path doesn’t lead where it should, and sometimes, there be dragons.

This book offers a field guide for charting a better course through unit planning. In its pages, you’ll learn to:

With real classroom examples and team-friendly protocols that apply to any subject, grade level, or program alongside a robust appendix full of practical use-tomorrow tools, you’ll navigate prepackaged or scripted curricula and prewritten units without losing sight of the students in front of you. The result? A path learners can take to their destination.

Like a map well marked, Unboxing the Curriculum plots a direct route through mandates and box sets right to the hearts of the students in front of you.

As an English teacher, Kate Roberts has seen the power of whole-class novels to build community in her classroom. But she’s also seen too many kids struggle too much to read them—and consequently, check out of reading altogether. Kate’s had better success getting kids to actually read—and enjoy it—when they choose their own books within a workshop model. “And yet,” she says, “I missed my whole-class novels.”

In A Novel Approach, Kate takes a deep dive into the troubles and triumphs of both whole-class novels and independent reading and arrives at a persuasive conclusion: we can find a student-centered, balanced approach to teaching reading. Kate offers a practical framework for creating units that join both teaching methods together and helps you:

Identify the skills your students need to learn

Choose whole-class texts that will be most relevant to your kids

Map out the timing of a unit and the strategies you’ll teach

Meet individual needs while teaching whole novels

Guide students to choice books and book clubs that build on the skills being taught.

Above all, Kate’s plan emphasizes teaching reading skills and strategies over the books themselves. “By making sure that our classes are structured in a way that really sees students and strives to meet their needs,” she argues, “we can keep reaching for the dream of a class where no student is unmoved, no reader unchanged by the end of the year.” Video clips of Kate working with students in diverse classrooms bring the content to life throughout the book.

Research should serve teachers—not the other way around.

Many teachers have experienced "the research" as something done to them rather than for them—findings handed down without context, mandates without mechanisms, tools that consume instructional time without improving it. Healing and Hacking the Research-Practice Divide argues that this situation isn't inevitable. Research can be powerful, humanizing, and liberatory—but only when it travels with humility, and only when teacher knowledge is recognized as evidence, too.

Rachael Gabriel and Kate Roberts offer practical tools, actionable frameworks, and honest analysis of how research moves through schools—and where it breaks down. Learn to evaluate studies, recognize their limits, and build inquiry practices that genuinely center your students, your context, and your professional knowledge.

This important guide offers tools teachers need to demystify research data and translate debate into informed practice. Inside you'll find:

The divide between research and practice isn't just a knowledge gap. It's a structural problem. This book gives you the language, the frameworks, and the confidence to name that gap, navigate it, and begin to heal it.