Today’s guest is Dr. Freddy Heibert. We’ll talk about her newly published book about vocabulary instruction, her work around text complexity and her site textproject.org, how to ensure self-selected reading time is worth the time, and more.  Later, I’m joined by my colleagues Macie Kerbs, Rosie Maurantonio, and Lea Leibowitz for a conversation about practical takeaways. **** Read a full transcript of this episode and learn more about the show at  jenniferserravallo.com/podcast Visit Text Project.org for Freddy's books and articles, hundreds of texts to use with children, and more (all free!) ****  About this episode’s guest: Elfrieda “Freddy” Hiebert (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin) has had a long career as a literacy educator, first as a teacher’s aide and teacher of primary-level students in California and, subsequently, as a teacher educator and researcher at the universities of Kentucky, Colorado-Boulder, Michigan, and California-Berkeley. Her research, which addresses how fluency, vocabulary, and knowledge can be fostered through appropriate texts, has been published in numerous scholarly journals and books. Through documents such as Becoming a Nation of Readers (Center for the Study of Reading, 1985) and Every Child a Reader (Center for the Improvement of Early Reading Achievement, 1999), she has contributed to making research accessible to educators. Hiebert’s contributions to research and practice have been recognized through awards such as the American Educational Research Association’s Research to Practice award (2013). Support the show