Cris loves studying the “knowing-doing” gap by investigating how to implement best practice research with 125+ students. Throughout her career, she has tried to take reading and writing research and apply it to all kinds of learning situations. She believes it is important to share with colleagues her successes as well as her failures to highlight how incredibly complex teaching is. 
 
For the past 34 years, Cris has taught grades one through twelve. In addition to being a classroom teacher, she’s had the privileged of working with preservice and secondary teachers. She served several years as an adjust professor at the University of Colorado at Denver and the Denver University. 
 
Cris provides workshops on disciplinary literacy as well as assessment for learning. Her focus is modeling how to integrate literacy strategies into lessons so students can be better readers and writers of disciplinary text. Her favorite days are the ones when she gets to plan with teachers and then work in classrooms with students. Cris strives to “walk the talk” as she models for teachers how to plan for engagement and execute instruction so that students get to read, write, and discuss for more minutes of the class period than their teacher talks. 
 
Cris’s new book is titled, Why Do I Have to Read This?  Literacy Strategies to Engage Our Most Reluctant Students. Other books she has written are: I Read it but I Don’t Get It, Do I Really Haveto Teach Reading? So, What do They Really Know? And No More Telling as Teaching: Less Lecture, More Engaged Learning. Less