The Book Whisperer

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 (7)

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)

Ah, the New Year, it’s a time for looking back on what has worked, what we would like to do differently, and what plans we can commit to in 2008 (at least for a while). I personally believe that you can make resolutions any day, any time. Hey, I have resolved to teach a lesson differently between first and second periods!

Along with my personal resolutions to exercise more and spend less of my weekends working on school stuff (same resolutions as last year), I am also looking back through my reader’s notebook to make my reading resolutions. We readers make lists and set goals. Type “reading resolutions” into any search engine, and you will see what I mean. I could spend 2008 surfing the reading goals of other readers…

I read 112 books last year. Not as many as some, but I am doing my part to raise the average of four books per year reportedly read by the typical adult American. In addition to reading lots of books, I always attempt to read works of literature that I missed during years of schooling, but I do not read as many of these timeless classics as I feel I should. Why does some part of me feel that I am a reading “imposter” if I do not read War and Peace again this year?

I could resolve to read all of the books I have bought, borrowed, or received as gifts. No matter how many books I read from the "Miller Mountain", the pile never gets smaller...

When looking at the development of young readers, there is no “quality over quantity” debate. I am all for reading (and teaching) great books, but the numbers don’t lie. The people who “run" the most reading miles are the best readers, a fact which doesn't apply solely to our students. I claim that classroom instruction would improve nationwide if every reading teacher would commit to becoming more prolific readers themselves.

Keeping this in mind, I hereby resolve to read more:

Children's Literature: Over 5,000 books for children are published each year. Those 100+ books I read last year (many not for kids) are not a drop in the publishing bucket. The flood of books my students have loaned me to read proves that I can never read enough to keep up with them. Every year I plan to read the Newbery Award medalists, a goal since fourth grade. Since becoming a teacher, I have added the Printz Award medalists, as well as the Texas Library Association’s Bluebonnet and Lone Star reading lists. This gives me 50 or so books to read that are well-reviewed and cover a wide range of reading and interest levels for my sixth graders. I have to be as knowledgeable as possible about what books are available so that I can make recommendations and talk to them about what they are reading.

Research: The best practices which can improve motivation, engagement, and capability for our students are constantly deepening and broadening our understanding of reading processes. I must commit to learning as much as I can about the science of teaching reading. Reading teachers, like all other professionals, must remain at the top of our game.

Out Loud: I try to read out loud to my students every day: poems, excerpts from books, articles that relate to what we are studying in social studies. I know what research tells us about the importance of reading out loud to students each day to increase their vocabulary, prior knowledge, and interest in reading. There are too many days, however, where we never make it to our special book, the one we are reading for fun and the love of sharing a story. Jim Trelease, forgive me, I promise to make more time for read-alouds.

On Thursday, when school resumes, my students will reflect on the reading they have done so far this school year, celebrate, and move on to make their reading resolutions for 2008. I can’t wait to read what they have to share. I think that list of mine is about to get longer...

So, what are your reading resolutions? What would you like to accomplish both as a reader and a reading teacher this year?

Posted by Donalyn Miller at 3:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)