Nancie Atwell

Nancie Atwell is an American educator and author best known for pioneering a reading-writing workshop approach for adolescents and for founding the Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL), a nonprofit K–8 demonstration school in Edgecomb, Maine, in 1990. A classroom teacher since 1973, she began her career in western New York, taught middle school in Tonawanda, and moved to Maine in 1975; she later became internationally recognized when she received the inaugural Global Teacher Prize, a $1 million award, in 2015.

Atwell is the author of influential professional texts for teachers, including In the Middle, a widely cited book on writing-reading workshop with adolescents that has sold more than half a million copies and reached a third edition, The Reading Zone, 2nd Edition: How to Help Kids Become Skilled, Passionate, Habitual, Critical Readers, and Seeking Diversity: Language Arts with Adolescents. She has written multiple books on teaching language arts, is noted for helping students read an average of about 40 self-selected books a year, and is the first classroom teacher to receive major research awards in her field, including the MLA Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize and NCTE’s David H. Russell Award.[4