Carolee dean biography of albert

My combined experiences as a young adult fiction author, poet, and speech-language pathologist working with students of all ages and ability levels have taught me the importance of using narratives as a teaching tool.

Everything we want to teach, from vocabulary and sentence structure to empathy and resilience, can be found in a good story. When my focus as a therapist shifted to working with students with dyslexia, I realized very quickly that there was a lack of age-appropriate and engaging decodable books for older readers.

I started creating my own to give my students reading practice with whatever specific skill they were working on at the time. Those stories evolved into the HOT ROD DECODABLE BOOKS series and supplementary resources to accompany the books on my website at Because of my extensive experience using narratives to teach a large variety of skills, I have also created STORY FRAMES FOR TEACHING LITERACY: ENHANCING STUDENT LEARNING THROUGH THE POWER OF STORYTELLING (Pa