Michael W. Smith

Michael W. Smith is a professor of literacy education in the College of Education at Temple University. His research focuses on how experienced readers read and talk about texts and what motivates adolescents' reading and writing inside and outside of school. Before moving into higher education, he spent eleven years teaching high school English.

He is the coauthor of Reading Unbound: Why Kids Need to Read What They Want and Why We Should Let Them (with Jeffrey D. Wilhelm and Sharon Fransen), which received the NCTE David H. Russell Award for Distinguished Research in the Teaching of English. He has authored or coauthored numerous other books on literacy and English education, including Reading Don't Fix No Chevys, Understanding Unreliable Narrators: Reading Between the Lines in the Literature Classroom, Getting It Right: Fresh Approaches to Teaching Grammar, and Developing Writers of Argument. Most recently, with Jeffrey D. Wilhelm, he co-authored Fighting Fake News: Teaching Students to Identify and Interrogate Information Pollution (Corwin, 2023), which helps middle and high school students critically evaluate digital information and recognize misinformation.