The Book Whisperer

A recent post from NYC Educator recounts an exchange with students about reading and how much they hate it. It is not hard to see the connection between this conversation and Readicide: How Schools are Killing Reading and What You Can Do about It, Kelly Gallagher’s newest book. I mentioned Readicide in my last post and invited readers to check out Kelly’s book and post questions about it.

I am not a big reader of books on the Web, preferring to curl up with the paper version, but I read Readicide over one long Saturday afternoon. Gallagher's book is compelling—full of alarming statistics that validate the beliefs of many teachers who see that standardized-testing is slowly killing reading for students and changing how reading is taught in America. Gallagher does not see this trend as irreversible, though. Each chapter provides practical, classroom-tested lessons that offer students more meaningful reading instruction than how to pass a test. The chapters explaining how teachers underteach books when failing to build students’ background knowledge for a book and overteach books by beating every literary element into the ground were particularly relevant—both in my own teaching and my conversations with colleagues.

Gallagher has traveled a five blog tour promoting his book and answering questions from readers. This week, Gallagher responds to the concerns of readers here at “The Book Whisperer.”

Administrators are enamored with data. They want multiple interim assessments that are showing progress towards goals. They want that data to be able to be put in reports and graphs and to be able to use it to compare teachers and/or schools. They want a uniform curriculum. And while I can understand their concerns as it applies to other content areas, what can I say to get them to realize that reading is so totally different that comparisons are not only faulty but dangerous?—Ramona Lowe, posted January 14, 2009

KG: I make the point in Readicide that I don’t think it has to be an either/or proposition. What I mean by this is that students can learn to read at richer and deeper levels without sacrificing test scores. If you teach students to read and write well, they will do fine on exams. But if we only teach students to read for exams, they will never read and write well. Good teaching will raise reading scores and help students become readers. Poor teaching sacrifices long-term reading goals for test results. For evidence of this, read Judith Langer’s Effective Literacy Instruction.

I wondered what Gallagher thought parents should do to offset the underteaching /overteaching. How do we know what teachers are doing, unless we can go to the classroom and sit in on the lessons? (I'm sure they would love that, and even if I did sit in on the lessons, I don't feel qualified to criticize someone who is probably doing their best in a rigged system.) Should we all rise up against useless worksheets and sticky notes?--zh posted on January 16, 2009

KG: Sticky notes, per se, are not a bad thing. I use them in my classroom to help students sharpen their reading skills. It’s the drowning of books in sticky notes that are a problem. As far as parenting goes, the most important thing you can do to counter readicide is to surround your children with high-interest reading materials and to model the pleasures of reading yourself. Be mindful of what Jim Trelease (author of The Read Aloud Handbook) calls the 3 B’s: the breakfast table, the bathroom, and the bed---make sure kids always have something to read at these three locations.
Ask your child’s teacher what is being done to foster recreational reading in the school. Share some of the studies in Readicide. Share the findings in the book with teachers and administrators. If your student is given obvious busy work, politely ask the teacher for the rationale.

You've got a work that's part of the curriculum, and it's challenging enough that you know you can't just assign it. (Because that's UNDERTEACHING, and we don't do that, do we? NO!) And it's not a short story or a brief poem - it's pretty long.
What are some strategies that YOU use to promote understanding (so we don't have to review and review and review) when the material is tough, and/or ones that promote engagement (so that if we DO have to spend some time reviewing, they're not already bored going in) when the work is assigned rather than self-selected?—clix posted January 27, 2009

KG: It’s a complex question, and of course, there is no canned answer. That is why teaching is so hard. There are a number of approaches that I do, most of them listed in my books Deeper Reading and Readicide, but I’ll share two quick ideas here.

1) I spend a lot of time teaching my students the value of 2nd and 3rd draft reading. I start with Humpty Dumpty and move up from there (Humpty Dumpty is not really about an egg; it takes more than one reading to figure that out). If you are teaching a great book, students should never be bored on a second draft reading---there is so much to discover that they didn’t see the first time they read the text. When teaching a required difficult text, I am always careful to decide what the specific purpose is going to be for reading the text and I teach to that purpose. I frame the text to support their reading and I help them heavily in the early chapters (before gradually releasing). Even with my scaffolding, their first draft readings are always surface-level readings. With that in mind, I plan periodical close readings---where we will spend an entire period examining a short passage. We will read it a number of times, each time through a different lens. I never focus on whether my students like the book; our focus is always on what value the book has to offer the modern reader.

2) I also talk a lot in Deeper Reading about the importance that confusion plays. When my students come to me they think confusion is bad. They are wrong. Confusion is the place where learning occurs. I teach my students what readers do when confronted by confusing passages. I do a lot of read aloud/think alouds in front of my students. I have them chart their confusion as they begin working their way into the novel. We stop periodically to see how much of their confusion has begun to lift. I work hard with my students to get them to see that strong readers do a much better job of working through ambiguity.

Check out Gallagher’s other interviews at: A Year of Reading, The Tempered Radical, The Dream Teacher, and The Reading Zone and discover methods for countering readicide in your own school and classroom.

**Although the news is all over the Web by now, I would be remiss in not mentioning that the American Library Association announced its 2009 children’s book award winners on Monday. I enjoyed the Newbery Gold Medal winner, The Graveyard Book, by Neal Gaiman, although I prefer his adult works like the Sandman graphic novels and American Gods. It dismayed me that my favorite book last year, The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins did not win anything—other than universal critical acclaim and six digit initial sales figures…

Posted by Donalyn Miller at 3:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Last week, the Department of Education released its latest report about the state of reading in America. Results, estimated from the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL), indicate that 32 million adult Americans lack fundamental literacy skills. Leaders in adult literacy education cite undiagnosed learning disabilities, immigration, and high school dropout rates as factors, but illiterate adults are not the only ones who aren’t reading. An oft-quoted 2007 Associated Press Poll found that 27% of adult Americans did not read a single book in 2006. It seems that fewer and fewer adults are reading—some due to poor reading ability and others by choice.

While we teachers may not identify with the mounting numbers of alliterate and illiterate adults in America (after all, we are reading, aren’t we?), these non-readers cross our paths—at meet the teacher nights and conferences. Many of the adults who don’t read are the parents of our students. Teachers expect parents to support literacy at home—reading to their children, taking them to the library and buying books, and sharing their literacy lives. What about parents who cannot do the job?

It is popular for educators to list poor parent role modeling as a reason, out of our control, when students cannot read well. Can we talk about the fact that these parents were once students in our classrooms, too? Many of these parents made it through the American educational system and never mastered basic reading skills or internalized reading as a meaningful pursuit. When you ask adults what they remember most about English class, they recall dissecting classics and copying definitions from dictionaries. Schools are not creating capable, lifelong readers, yet we expect parents to rise from the ashes of their own reading failures or apathy and become reading role models for their own kids.

I hear it almost every day, “He is just like his father, he hates to read, too,” or “I was never a reader much myself, she must have gotten that from me,” as if reading interest and ability are traits you inherit like eye color or attached earlobes. A reading gene has not been found, but we recognize the environmental connection. Parents who don’t read often have children who don’t read, and the generational cycle continues on and on.

If we want our students to have reading role models at home, perhaps we should start graduating some.

For parents who do read, they often battle schools to keep their children reading. My husband and I read enough books to raise the average for our entire neighborhood. But our strong examples are not always enough to encourage our two daughters to read. When our oldest daughter was in high school, the major activity in her English classes was watching movies adapted from books she never read. Our fourth grader spends her days cranking out endless test practice worksheets and reading Pollyanna for two months. It is all we can do to keep the reading fires burning in the deluge of soul-killing reading instruction our daughters receive at school.

I know that many of you stoke these fires in your classrooms every day, like I do, but there is no guarantee that students who leave our classrooms strong, avid readers will remain so until graduation (or parenthood). Systemic change in reading instruction from the first day of kindergarten to the last day of high school must occur before we can consistently guarantee readers will emerge from our schools. The task seems daunting.

One respected voice, who offers solutions, is Kelly Gallagher. Well-known as a literacy consultant and author of three popular books on adolescent literacy, Kelly confronts the lack of critical reading skills and poor motivation to read with his high school students every day. In his newest book, Readicide: How Schools are Killing Reading and What You Can Do about It, Kelly explores how schools often cause students to hate reading or fail to cultivate necessary literacy skills and suggests more effective instructional strategies that have proven successful with his own students.

Kelly selected “The Book Whisperer” as a stop on his Readicide blog book tour. Preview the entire manuscript of Readicide free, and submit questions for Kelly by posting comments to this blog. Answers to your questions will appear on January 28th. Readicide will steel your resolve and promote dialogue with your colleagues and administrators. Check out this powerful addition to the reading instruction debate and add your voice to what should be a national conversation.

Posted by Donalyn Miller at 12:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (12)