The Book Whisperer

Click, click. My classroom is silent except for the scratching of pencils and that horrid noise. Click, click. My students are half way through a practice test for the state reading assessment. Click, click. One boy in the corner is methodically pushing the lid on and off a highlighter while he works. Click, click. This incessant hearbeat beneath the floorboards of my classroom is driving me mad. Click, click. I silently approach my tormentor, and look at his test. Click, click. A sea of neon alien blood flows across his paper; it appears that he is marking every other line in a code that only he can decipher. Click, cl… I thrust my open hand in front of him, and he places the offending marker into it. The clicking stops and I retain my sanity for another day.

When my students finish, we gather to discuss the passages and the questions. I want to know what test-taking skills my 6th grade students use after three years of taking the TAKS (Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills). Beginning a list on the board, I ask,

“What reading strategies did you use to take the practice test today?”

Hands shoot up around the room, and I jot down their responses,

“I read the questions first before I read the passage.” (I wonder if he even reads the passages, or just hunts for the answers to the questions.)

“I write a summary of every paragraph.”(EVERY paragraph?)

“When I answer the questions, I write down the paragraph number that proves my answer.” (What about the answers that are not stated outright in the text?)

“I highlight all of the names, dates, titles, and underlined words.” (Ah, that was what he was doing…)

“I read every passage three times.”(Not two, not four, exactly three. Having read a lot of folktales this year, my students can tell you about the significance of the number three.)

It goes on and on, as my students share all of the test-taking secrets they have learned over the years. One boy offers to teach the class his method for choosing which test answer is the best summary, the mystical “B-M-E" which stands for beginning, middle, and end,

“Whichever answer choice has something from the beginning of the story, the middle of the story, and the end of the story is the best summary.”

I have to ask, “How do you decide where the middle is?”

“Oh, that’s easy, I count how many paragraphs are in the story, and then I divide it by two.”(What a great way to integrate math into my reading class.)

I can’t take it anymore. I cry out, “Why? Why do you do all of these things? How do these tricks help you read the test?”

There are less raised hands this time, but I call on one brave volunteer,

“My teacher in fourth grade told me to highlight everything that was important. If we didn’t do this during practice tests, she would take points off our grades.”

Nods and murmurs around the room tell me that this was a common occurrence. Instead of a toolbox of reading strategies that students can use across a variety of reading situations, they carry a cracked valise full of garlic and holy water—ancient talismans passed down from teachers to survive the test. The kids don’t even know why they are using most of these tricks; they just know they are supposed to. Dragging these strategies out into the sunlight reveals their true purpose: get students to slow down, take their time, and focus on their reading. Why don’t we just tell students that?

I agree that we should show students how to read a multiple choice test. The format of these tests is unique, and students must employ specific strategies to read one. But test reading is only one genre that students must master. Drilling test-practice at the expense of teaching authentic reading is a Sisyphean task teachers repeat, year after year, never getting students to the top of the reading hill.

Spending weeks, or horrifyingly in some classrooms, months, on test-taking lore denies students a lot of time that would be better spent reading and discussing real books—a practice that is shown again and again to positively impact students’ reading achievement.

I have never seen a student who could read and comprehend a wide range of texts fail these tests, but I have seen a few students, carrying only a handful of test-taking beans, who did.

Myths, legends, and scary stories are genres, just like reading tests are, but they are not methods for teaching reading. We are teachers in classrooms, not shamans around campfires. The only trickery that should be found in reading class is in fairytales.

Posted by Donalyn Miller at 12:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Powerful thunderstorms ripped through North Texas on Wednesday night. Built on the site of an old tree farm, my subdivision was decimated, with countless old growth trees torn apart by gale force winds and tossed onto cars, roofs, and streets. Uprooted during the storm, my neighbor’s thirty-foot maple fell into our yard, killing one of our oak trees, and dragging the utility pole and power lines for our block down with it. Without power for three days, we searched for something to do when our little house became a dark cave by eight pm each night.

Laughing at me a bit when I begged them to tell me who was voted off American Idol, my students knew that life without TV, computers, and lights was a challenge for most, but one boy remarked, “Hey, you have hundreds of books don’t you? I guess you will just read until the power comes back on!” I smiled and agreed, knowing he was right.

If you have not read a book with a flashlight since you were a child, I recommend you do it again. Traveling with a book’s characters--wrapped together in a small circle of light--is a journey that we should not relegate to childhood. My husband finished Eoin Colfer’s latest adventure yarn, Airman, claiming it was one of the best reading experiences of his life. Our nine year-old begged us to read ghost stories by candlelight because these were, in her opinion, “the best stories” to read in a house draped in eerie silence and creepy shadows. Under the glow of my book light, I reread an old favorite, Cornelia Funke’s The Thief Lord. Running through the canals and cathedrals of Venice with the orphan heroes Prosper and Scipio, I escaped, leaving my troubles behind.

English professor Mason Cooley said it best, “Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are." I have embraced this idea my entire life. I will never climb Mount Everest, but I have seen its glaciers and peaks through the eyes of courageous explorers. I will never meet Winston Churchill or Helen Keller, but reading their memoirs gave me a chance to sit in their company, and learn from what they knew. The only people I know who count rogues and saints among their companions are readers. I don't consider my life a small one, though. Readers live bigger lives than those who don't read, and we know that books radiate light back onto us a hundred fold.

Books are a candle of solace when we suffer, a warm friend when we need one, and a neon sign marking exits from the confines of our mundane existence.

Books illuminate our hearts and brains, banishing shadows from dark corners, and lighting the way for us like no TV glow ever can.

As long as there is just enough light to read by, readers are never without power.

Posted by Donalyn Miller at 1:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Readers of this blog know that I promote reading a wide range of materials in the classroom, and believe that all sorts of books are inroads to meeting curriculum goals. I believe that students, under the guidance of informed librarians and teachers, should choose their own reading materials. This philosophy is the cornerstone of my teaching, and one of my secrets for motivating young readers.

While I have been waving my banner of free choice reading around, the Texas State Board of Education has debated mandates that effectively take those decisions away from my students and me.

Irony--It’s what’s for dinner.

For the past two years stakeholders, including teachers and experts in the literacy field, have worked to rewrite Texas’ content standards for teaching English Language Arts and Reading. In February, this group finalized plans to present their revised standards to the Board and develop a timeline for implementation.

Two days before the implementation hearing, a conservative faction of the Board presented a “substitute amendment” which in affect threw out the standards created by the committee charged with writing them, in favor of an antiquated set of standards that included recommended texts for each grade level. Here is what a reading classroom would look like under the new proposed standards:

Primary students would read a time capsule of Newbery classics from the World War II and Eisenhower years like The Courage of Sarah Noble (1954) and The Matchlock Gun (1941). Intermediate students would read Robinson Crusoe (1719), poems by Emerson and Longfellow, and The Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889). In sixth grade, students would have the choice to read the most recent title on the suggested list, Across Five Aprils, written in 1964.

Even the most outdated school library in America includes authors like Judy Blume, Jerry Spinelli, E.L. Konigsburg, and Gary Paulsen, and yet not one book by these revered authors made the list.

Welcome to Texas- where it is 1950 all over again!

The suggestion that students read only from a list of outdated Eurocentric literature continues in middle and high school. In spite of language that indicates secondary students should “read independently books of various genres from accepted fiction and non-fiction lists,” not one book from the standards’ own lists was published in the last thirty years. Seventh graders would have been advised to read Born Free (1960), and eight graders, Kon-Tiki (1950). Juniors would explore the history of American literature from 1600 to the present with Arthur Miller, Martin Luther King, Jr., Bernard Malamud, Anne Tyler, and Larry McMurtry as the only suggested contemporary authors. Seniors would study the history of British literature which apparently ended with Dylan Thomas and George Bernard Shaw.

While you are laughing and shaking your heads, may I remind you that we planted the seeds for NCLB right here in Houston. Texas is one of the largest purchasers of textbooks in the United States and has a great deal of influence over what gets put in them.

In early March, teachers and advocates from the minority community, pointing out the absence of texts by African-American and Hispanic authors on the suggested lists, were patronized by revisers who scrambled to throw in a few multicultural titles. African-American students would have enjoyed Ananszi tales and Bre’er Rabbit as part of their rich literary heritage. Marquez’ Love in the Time of Cholera and Cisneros’ House on Mango Street would have apparently been enough for the 2 million Hispanic school children in Texas, who would have had to wait until high school to read these influential works.

On March 28th, presented with the third revision of the standards in two months, the State Board abandoned recommending titles altogether and agreed that practitioners should make decisions on what is best for their students when it comes to selecting materials to teach the curriculum.

While we Texas teachers breathe a sigh of relief, I can’t help thinking about the dangers of any agency or school district that recommends reading lists to its teachers. After all, such a list is instantly out of date no matter how current or inclusive the document is when created. Texas standards are updated once every ten years, automatically excluding the subsequent decade of books that will be published after the standards are adopted. Furthermore, policy makers can call a list “suggested” or “recommended” all it wants to, but we all know that these lists morph into required lists when textbooks, standardized tests, and purchasing decisions are shaped around the perceived recommendations from a state body.

The argument for making book recommendations to teachers is that these lists will serve as a guide for teachers who are new or who need help choosing books that show specific examples of the standards to be taught. A noble goal, but one doomed to fail when the lists deny teachers the opportunity to choose materials that meet the interests, needs, or backgrounds of the particular students served by that teacher. I know that many states and districts create such lists.

What are your experiences with recommended lists? How have these lists supported you or limited you when making instructional decisions for your students?

Posted by Donalyn Miller at 2:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

It has rained all day. You glass-half-empty types might gnash your teeth over a day of Spring Break wasted, but I have always seen rainy days as an excuse to read. I would like nothing more right now than to curl up in my rabbit-hole, channel my inner Alice, and fall into a book, but I can’t. I am supposed to be writing, writing, writing...

It seems that unleashing my reading zealotry here at Teacher Magazine has attracted some notice. After several gee-I-am-in-over-my-head meetings, I have secured a contract from Jossey-Bass Publishing, a division of Wiley, to write a book about my views towards reading, students, and putting the two together.

Hey, didn’t anyone tell these guys that I am a reader, not a writer?

Chanting the mantra “write what you know,” I can accept that I do know a thing or two about books and inspiring students to read them. But even after teaching writing for six years, I realize that I did not know much about writing before this ride began.

Writing a book is the only activity I can think of that makes grading mountains of students’ essays an appealing alternative.

As Thomas Mann once said, “A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” Vanity, I suppose, to call myself a writer when we all know that I am just a language arts and social studies teacher in the ‘burbs.

Yes, the book deal is thrilling and surreal. Thanks for reading the blog and helping make this happen. Please forgive me if I whine a little while chained to my laptop today.

Here are some things (OK, my editor has told me that the word “things” is out) I have learned. Let me share some observations--

• Even the most assertive person can have a passive voice when writing.

• You can start a sentence with a conjunction, and end one with a preposition, but “ironic” quotations marks are out.

• Reading Richard Allington, Lucy Calkins, and Janet Allen is even better the second (or third) time.

• Fast food meals and dry cleaning expenses for your family are not deductible.

• Scrutinizing your teaching practices is 30% gratifying and 70% horrifying.

• The word “student” doesn’t have enough synonyms.

• Parents who never sign a report card are all too willing to sign a release for their child to be in your book.

• A writing retreat in the woods is every writer’s fantasy for a reason.

• DEADLINE should always be written in capitals and shouted when spoken.

• Downloading Journey tunes to your iPod and surfing the ‘Net for snappy quotes about reading are not research.

And last,

• Writing a book about teaching is not as fun as doing it.

I suppose this last one, my gentle readers, is the point of the whole “thing.”

Posted by Donalyn Miller at 7:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

As both the language arts and social studies teacher for my group of 60, I am charged with covering a great deal of content. While studying Europe, it is required that students examine World War II. My students already learned a lot about this war last year.

Looking for ways to make this unit fresh and interesting, I chose to conduct a book study. Students picked a book on World War II from our vast class library, and focused their reading on the background of the characters, how each became involved in the conflict, and the short-term and long-term consequences of the war for them.

Nearing the date for the class discussion of what they had learned, I checked in with my students to see how the reading was going. Many students were having trouble staying motivated to finish their books. I couldn’t believe their lack of interest. These kids are readers-- hungry, enthusiastic readers. I have worked all year to make them so.

While chastising them for their lack of effort to complete their reading, my students let me know that in large part, the culture of independent, opinionated readers I have fostered in my class made this assignment boring:

“I don’t like Number the Stars, but I am forcing myself to read it because I have to.”(forcing yourself to read it?!)

“I wanted to read Don’t You Know There's a War On? , but J. took the class copy and I got stuck reading Lily’s Crossing.” (definite chick book, why did he pick it?)

“I’ve already read three books on World War II this year. Can’t I just use one of them?”(hmm...seems reasonable...)

and my favorite,

“Mrs. Miller, I am in the middle of Inkheart right now, don’t you know how hard that book is to put down?” (yes, yes, I do.)

Some students selected the very shortest books that they could find, or were reading books in which they had no interest just to get the job done--behaviors they had never shown before.

Transformed, our class was now a place where students dreaded reading and only did it for the sake of getting the assignment over with as fast and as painlessly as possible.

I was horrified.

I had somehow stripped the joy for reading out of my students, joy I had strived all year to instill. I had turned them loose to feel book love and the freedom that making all of their own reading choices brings, some for the first time. By requiring that they read certain books, on a specific topic, within a deadline, I had hobbled my wild-at-heart readers.

And now, they were looking at me wistfully over the fence.

Issuing rare weekend homework, I gave my students two more days to finish their books. Most of them were able to meet the deadline. For the final activity, students composed a critical summary for their books, evaluating the impact World War II had on the lives of the stakeholders involved.Turning in their essays one by one, students returned to their desks, and pulled out books. The books I had kept them from reading during the book study.

Running through the pages of their own books, my students were free again. Surveying a room full of readers, I realized that if I can keep the gate open, and have the sense to get out of the way, they will read.

Posted by Donalyn Miller at 2:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (10)

Primum non nocere- “First do no harm.” This tenet of the medical profession reminds doctors to consider the negative consequences of any medical intervention alongside the advantages. Quality of life for the patient overrides all other benefits of a course of treatment. I believe that the teaching profession needs this lesson as much as doctors do.

Little children love to read, or at least be read to. Even the most dormant readers in my classes can remember a book they have loved, even if it was Green Eggs and Ham. How sad that they have to reach back to their preschool memories to recall a book which they enjoyed. After years of schooling, book love goes away for many kids. Those of us who are charged with teaching students to read claim not to understand why love for reading and books goes away, but I secretly (OK, not so secretly, now) suspect that we do know. The manner in which schools institutionalize reading takes this love away from children.

What does reading look like for you? For me, reading is not just something I do; being a reader is something I am. In many ways, being a reader has defined my life. I married a reader, hang out with other readers in book clubs and grad classes, and have dedicated my professional life to working with children as a reading teacher. I want my students to see reading the way that I do.

Not only am I a passionate reader, I am a great test taker, too. I can dissect tests on topics which I do not know that much about in large part because I am a great reader. Let me repeat, I am a good test-taker because I am a good reader; I am not a good reader because I am a good test-taker.

Standardized reading test season has descended on classrooms, and the reading instruction in many of these rooms has narrowed to a handful of test-taking tricks drilled into students day in and day out in an endless, monotonous stream of acronyms, chants, and strategies. Make no mistake about it, no matter what we proclaim to our students about book love the rest of the year, this is the message they get from school about what reading is. The focus on test-taking "drill and kill" slowly strangles the joy of reading out of students, and narrows their possibilities as readers forever more.

Is there any teacher in the world who truly, with all of their hearts, believes that they are creating resilient, capable readers with all of this drill? The ugly truth is we know we aren’t, but we are doing what many administrators, parents, and legislators expect from us- get students to pass the test, the test, the test. If our students don’t ever pick up a book again after graduation, it is not our fault.

What we fail to confront in our hearts is the reality that those students who grew to love reading in spite of us still do better on those tests than all of the kids who endured years of reading instruction by highlighter, but never really read. Readers real-I-cannot-wait-to-get-my- hands-on-a-book-readers outstrip their peers on every test, every time.

Isn’t this what students should learn from us about reading?

It is an ethical issue, not just an instructional one. Children, who once sat on a lap and fell in love with a book, trust us and deserve more.

First, do no harm. Do not take away that love of reading for the sake of a test score. There is a reason it's called "drill and kill." It kills children’s love of reading for all of their lives.

Posted by Donalyn Miller at 5:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Schools spend a lot of money purchasing reading programs to increase achievement for their students. The logic behind this quest for the perfect program is that administrators will no longer have to worry about the variables of teacher quality or student preparedness because this “research-based” program will create a level of idiot-proof (that’s us, by the way) consistency that guarantees better instruction. The fact that few, if any, of these scripted programs have been “research-proven” to work consistently with any groups of readers is glossed over by the publishers of these programs who stand to make a lot of money off of our fear.

Granted, many of the newer programs do include a modest supply of real books for students to use along with the program, but I could not find one that supplies the hundreds of books that the most effective classrooms should have. Whether or not the mandated program includes books for students to read is a moot point for the poorest schools, who cannot afford the thousands of dollars needed to purchase these programs for their students, anyway.

When I am out talking to teachers about the need to provide their students with choices in reading material at an appropriate level, one of the first questions I am always asked is, “Where am I going to get the books?” Although many schools purchase expensive program kits for all of the reading teachers in the building, I find very few schools that will fund substantial classroom libraries. The teachers I know that have the best classroom libraries have purchased most of these books with their own money. The government supports teachers in subsidizing our own classrooms by allowing us to deduct $250 a year, but I wish they would just buy us the books.

School libraries receive less and less funding each year, too, with some schools closing their libraries or decreasing library staff to save money. Check out the American Library Association’s updates on funding cuts to libraries and the consequences for communities and schools.

There are numerous studies which prove, not claim, that access to books increases reading achievement for children. The lack of funding or support for classroom and school libraries seems to run counter to common sense. After all, we know that students who read the most are the best readers. What are students supposed to read if there are no books?

Not surprisingly, the poorest schools have the smallest school and classroom libraries, and their students also have the fewest number of books at home. Where can a poor child get books to read without access to quality libraries?

There is one program whose mission has been to give free books to the poorest children in America for over 40 years, Reading Is Fundamental. RIF, founded in 1966, and continuously supported by federal funds since 1975, gives away 16 million books a year. With the federal mandate to increase reading achievement for all children, supporting RIF with federal money makes good sense. So what happened to RIF when the 2009 budget proposal came out last week? The new budget will cut RIF’s funding by $25.5 million. This loss of funding will eliminate the Inexpensive Book Distribution program, and further limit access to books for 4.6 million American families.

I wonder how much federal money will be used to buy those nifty kits next year?

Posted by Donalyn Miller at 10:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Staggering out of bed at 5:00 am, I boot up my laptop and start typing sub plans. I hate to be absent, but my swollen throat and painful ear leave me no choice. I begin my plans with the same opening paragraphs I have used before:

Dear Sub,

When students enter the classroom, they should get out their books and read. This is not free time or study hall, but an important part of our reading class. Do not allow students to work on homework, draw, or play board games…

Now, my students know that they are supposed to read at the beginning of every class, but they are kids, and while the cat’s away… I have been caught by surprise many times when the fine people who have substituted in my room have seen this reading time as free time that I have added to my plans in the absence of something “instructional” to do.

Hopefully, our students know reading is important. Is the only place they hear this message in reading class? What confounds me is the number of adults out there who do not realize that their attitudes may be sending the unintentional message that reading is a waste of time.

Take our recent fieldtrip. Anticipating a long bus ride and a bit of standing around, several of my students brought their books with them.

Seeing children with books in tow, the university docent, who was leading our tour, was annoyed, “They should not have those books.”

I assured her, “They won’t read while we are on the tour. Why shouldn’t they have them?”

Flustered, she said, “Well…they might lose them!”

I think it bugged her that my students might think any part of the fieldtrip was so boring that they might need a diversion. When was the last time she had to sit for an hour on a school bus?

I have been approached on the playground and gently advised that one of my students, a soccer champ, should put down her book and get some exercise. I have been told that it is dangerous to let my students walk down the hall reading. I had a colleague tell me a few years ago that I was preventing a student from developing his social skills because I let him read at lunch. When I pointed out to her that he was elected by the other kids as our class student council representative, she dropped it.

Perhaps, having only seen reading take place within the confines of a school desk cage, these well-meaning adults no longer recognize what reading looks like in the wild.

This misunderstanding doesn’t end when school does. My husband, a lifetime reader, takes on the mystique of the last passenger pigeon when other commuters waiting for the train eye him with his latest book.

Yes, I think exercise, socializing, and fieldtrips are valuable parts of my students’ education, but let’s not forget that they learn a lot about behavioral norms from us, too. If the adults with whom children come in daily contact don't encourage their reading habits, what message are we sending?

So, have you praised a reader today? One outside of a classroom? They are out there-- I promise. Scope out those buses, lunchrooms, and lines; find yourself a reader, and praise them loud and clear. You might be doing more for that child, and everyone within earshot, than anything else you planned to do today.

Posted by Donalyn Miller at 2:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

I promised last week to provide solutions and compromises for how to best teach whole class novels or share common texts with your students. Many of the comments posted to last week’s entry suggest a range of methods for approaching this issue. This advice, from fellow classroom teachers, includes many practical ideas. Go back and read their comments along with my suggestions.

If you have to read a specific book with your students:

Read the book out loud to them. Your ability to fluently read a text that may be inaccessible to many students increases their comprehension, vocabulary development, and enjoyment.

Share read the book. Share reading requires you to read the text out loud to students while they follow along in their own copies. In addition to the benefits of read alouds, share reading increases students’ reading speed because they have to keep up with someone who reads at a faster rate than they do. Additionally, students’ sight word recognition of vocabulary is increased because unknown words are pronounced for them. Instead of focusing mental energy on decoding, students can focus on comprehension.

Strip away every bit of “Language Arts and Crafts”. Any activity that does not involve reading, writing, or discussion is an extra that takes away from students’ development as readers, writers, and thinkers. Richard Allington reminds us in What Really Matters for Struggling Readers that, “When we plan to spend six weeks on Island of the Blue Dolphin, we plan to limit children’s reading and fill class time with other activities.”

Narrow down the amount of literary elements you are explicitly teaching. Do not try to use one text to teach everything a ninth grader needs to know about symbolism, characterization, or figurative language. Focus only on those elements that students need for comprehension. Same goes for explicitly teaching vocabulary.

Evaluate whether or not you are truly required to read a certain text or if this is simply tradition. Teaching the same books year after year because that is what has always been done, you have invested so much energy in crafting your novel unit, or because you have all of those books in the closet doesn’t leave much consideration for students.

If you are only expected to meet specific instructional goals, consider these alternatives:

Select one theme or concept which students are expected to understand and then gather a wide range of texts on this topic. For our current study of World War II, I am expected to explore with students how different groups became involved in the war and how they were affected by it. Using a Janet Allen-style Book Pass, students will select a book on World War II, either fiction or non-fiction, and read it. All writing and discussion will circle back to our two guiding questions. This issue-based study will be much broader and richer than if we read just one book together. We can look at the war from the points of view of all of the stakeholders involved and not just one or two groups.

Naturally, using universal themes or literary elements as the anchor for instruction instead of one text acknowledges the wide range of reading levels and interests in a classroom and still allows the teacher to meet curriculum goals. If your district or school is promoting differentiated instruction, this is the simplest way for a reading teacher to do it.

Use short stories and poems to teach literary elements or reading skills and ask students to apply their understanding of these concepts with their independent books. When teaching conflict to my sixth graders, we read several short stories from our adopted textbook and discussed the types of conflicts in the stories and how they were resolved. Students were then asked to reflect on their independent novels, identify the conflicts in the story, and evaluate how these conflicts were resolved or make predictions on how they should be resolved. Any student who can do this has shown me that not only do they understand the concepts of conflict and resolution, but that they also have comprehended the story, no book report needed.

Reading one book together is not the only way to share literacy in a classroom. Students passing books back and forth because they have liked them and found them meaningful, students begging you to read out loud to them, students arguing about the motives of the characters in their own books, all of these activities build a community of readers.

Posted by Donalyn Miller at 5:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

My seventeen year-old-daughter is what we call here in Texas, “a long, tall drink of water." I, on the other hand, have a full-figured glass that has overflowed. When shopping, we laugh when we see clothes sporting tags that claim “one size fits all” remarking, “Not us!”

Stretch this t-shirt over the ubiquitous practice in reading classrooms of teaching whole-class novels, and you can see that it doesn't fit most readers.

Teachers build elaborate units of instruction around novels--breaking down a text into discreet concepts for closer study. As a new teacher, the best you can hope for as a means of survival is that some wiser teacher will share these Rosetta Stones that decipher how to teach reading, complete with all of the activities you need to get your students “through” a book.

Many school districts and schools create a list of required novels that all students in a grade level are supposed to read. These lists are revered as sacred law in spite of the fact that you cannot find a single state or national standard which requires students to read certain texts.

So what is the purpose of this practice? Many teachers claim that it is important to expose students to great works of literature. Students need to read The Scarlet Letter and Huckleberry Finn as part of their cultural heritage. I don’t disagree with this goal in theory; after all, I had to smile to myself when my daughter, after reading The Crucible, referred to Salem in a joke. But is the ability to generate a pithy literary reference all she got out of reading Miller’s play?

Teaching whole-class novel units does not create a society of literate people. Take a poll of friends and relatives (those who did not become teachers) and ask them how they feel about the books they read in high school. Now, ask them how much they still read. In the Phi Delta Kappan article, “Farewell to Farewell to Arms: Deconstructing the Whole Class Novel”, Douglas Fisher and Gay Ivey attest that, “…students are not reading more or reading better as a result of the whole-class novel. Instead, students are reading less and are less motivated, less engaged, and less likely to read in the future.” Teachers can always point to a few students who loved these books, but I doubt it was the majority or that any became future readers as a result.

When I have denounced teaching whole-class novels in past entries, the comments I received from readers spanned a range of emotions from hearty agreement to derision. I feel emotional about this topic, too, so let's take emotion out of the equation and face some truths:

No one piece of text can meet the needs of all readers. A typical heterogeneous classroom may have a range of readers that spans four or more grade levels. It is impossible to find a book that is at an instructional level for all of these students.

Reading a whole class novel often takes too long. Planning a month or more of instruction around one text replaces a lot of time students could be reading more books on a wider range of topics. It takes even a slow reader only a few weeks to read a book at their reading level. Do the math.

Laboring over a novel reduces comprehension and denies students the ability to fall into a story by breaking books into chapter-bites. No reader, outside of school, engages in this piecemeal method of reading.

Students’ interests in what they choose to read are ignored. Reading becomes an exercise in what the teacher expects you to get out of the book they chose for you, a surefire way to kill all motivation to read-- other than to complete assignments.

Many novel units are stuffed with what education gadfly, Michael Schmoker, calls, “Language Arts and Crafts”, extensions and fun activities which are meant to motivate students, but suck up days of time in which the students are NOT READING OR WRITING.

What about those students who have already read the book? Admittedly, this may be a small number of readers, but I have sixth graders who have read To Kill a Mockingbird or The Outsiders, two books I know are taught in future years. Are they going to be expected to read it again- for two months?

Finally, I am not convinced that these “event novels” even accomplish one of their primary claims- broadening students’ understanding of the complex themes of human experience. No one book can teach students everything they need to know about prejudice, friendship, or honor.

I personally believe that the widespread use of whole-class novel units is to provide teachers with a plan of attack, a method to objectively approach literary analysis which is a largely subjective endeavor.

Whoops, there I go, getting all emotional again…

I have some ideas, some compromises and alternatives, which I will share in next week’s entry.

Posted by Donalyn Miller at 4:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)