The Book Whisperer

by Donalyn Miller

  These reluctant or—to identify them more positively—dormant readers are the students who read in order to pass their classes or do well on state tests but who never embrace reading as a worthwhile pursuit outside of school. These students read their assigned books, do their assigned activities, and drop the books when weekends or summers arrive and they don’t have to read anymore. Reading is work, not pleasure. Without support for their reading interests and role models who inspire them to read, these students never discover that reading is enjoyable.

  The burden of poor reading skills or a disability that impedes their ability to read well is not what prevents dormant readers from being enthusiastic readers. After all, the majority of people who graduate from school are not lagging behind in their reading to the extent that they cannot get along in the world. So why do so many people who can read choose not to do so? I think that dormant readers might become engaged readers if someone showed them that reading was engaging.

  I believe that all dormant readers have a reader inside themselves, somewhere. They simply need the right conditions in order to let that reader loose—the same conditions that developing readers need: hours and hours of time spent reading, the freedom to make their own reading choices, and a classroom environment that values independent reading. Children love stories, which offer the escape of falling into unknown worlds and vicariously experiencing the lives of the characters. Children’s attachment to the story arcs in video games and television programs bears this out.

  What students lack are experiences that show them that books have the same magic. They have never been given the chance to discover the worlds that books can contain. Because so many students’ reading choices are dictated by their teachers, they never learn how to choose books for themselves. How can they shape a self-identity as a reader if they never get the chance to find out what they like? If you are a student and your entire class is reading one book together (a common practice), what do you do if you don’t like that book? How would that uninteresting book color your view of books in general? By denying students the opportunity to choose their own books to read, teachers are giving students a fish year after year but never teaching them to go near the water, much less fish for themselves.

  Because dormant readers are good enough readers, able to jump through the reading hoops in the typical classroom, they don’t garner much concern from teachers—but they should. Students who don’t read, even if they are capable of completing reading tasks at school, run the risk of falling behind students who read more than they do. After all, Mark Twain reminds us, “The man who does not read great books is no better than the man who can’t.” At the beginning of the year, I find that dormant readers constitute the largest segment of readers in my classes.

  Hope

  Hope provides an example of what a dormant reader looks like on arrival in one of our classrooms. Despite the fact that Hope succeeded in her schoolwork and excelled on state assessments every year, she did not see herself as a reader and found few books worth reading. I placed book after book in her hands, hoping she would find one that she liked. Hope took my offerings dutifully at first. Some she read, and some she snuck back onto the shelf. Slowly, she began to find books that spoke to her eclectic spirit. She gravitated toward books with bizarre settings and fantastical elements, like The Giver, by Lois Lowry, and Coraline, by Neil Gaiman. When Hope began to express preferences for certain types of books, I had seeds of information that helped me lead her to more books. I have a penchant for fantasy, science fiction, and traditional literature (legends, myths, and fairy tales). Hope and I connected over our shared love of Greek mythology in particular, so I suggested books to her that I knew she would enjoy reading. The more books I recommended that she liked, the more Hope trusted me to suggest books.

  What Hope needed was a chance to browse through lots of books every day and an opportunity to read widely. I remember how reluctant Hope once was when I see her these days, legs slung over a chair in our school lobby, waiting on her ride home, nose buried in a book. She is still a regular visitor to my library, even though she left my class long ago.

  Underground Readers

  Underground readers are gifted readers, but they see the reading they are asked to do in school as completely disconnected from the reading they prefer to do on their own. Underground readers just want to read and for the teacher to get out of the way and let them. I was this type of reader in high school. While my teacher spent six weeks dragging the class through Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, a book I finished in a week, I whiled away the time by creeping myself out with Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot and mind-traveling to Polynesia through James Michener’s Hawaii. In accordance with the unwritten contract between my teacher and me, she overlooked my obvious boredom with her class and I kept my mouth shut and my head down, reading from my own book, which I kept hidden inside my desk. I took sly pride in the fact that I earned an A+ on the final for Huckleberry Finn when I had not even finished the last third of the book. The teacher belabored the plot and her interpretation of it for so long that I knew what she would ask us on the test without even reading the book.

  While teachers scurry to support students who are still developing their reading skills and wonder what they can do to motivate the dormant readers who do not like to read, underground readers are a subset whose needs go unaddressed. These children are the ones who come into our classes as avid readers. The opportunity to graze through stacks of books, picking those that look interesting to them and getting the time to read for hours in school is the dream of every underground reader, but underground readers have had to accept that this freedom is not going to happen in most of the classrooms they sit in year after year. These students have such advanced reading abilities and sophisticated tastes that few teachers design instruction around their needs, preferring instead to develop a curriculum that supports most of the other students, who are reading at or below grade level.

  Randy

  Some underground readers are the bright and shining stars of the reading classroom, the ones who other students know are readers, who reinforce for teachers that some of their instruction must be working because these students do so well on the teacher’s assessments. Of course, these students would have done well on these assessments from day one. Or underground readers might be students like Randy, who, by most measures of school success, failed my class. (I was still stifled by other people’s expectations for my teaching back then.) Randy was always lugging around some massive tome with a dragon on the cover. I knew he was a reader, but Randy could not have cared less about completing any assignments; he just wanted to read. Because his grades were so low, my school’s guidelines required that I put Randy in my after-school tutoring group, even though we both knew he did not need it. While his mother, my teaching partners, and I held innumerable conferences that year, discussing what we were going to do with Randy, he sat in the hall, reading happily.

  Predictably, because he read constantly, Randy scored in the 95th percentile on the state reading test and was promoted to seventh grade. I am confident that he is still out there somewhere, reading a four-hundred-page book and checked out mentally from his reading class. I let Randy down. Is there one of us who is not haunted by the memory of a child we failed? I wish I could be his teacher again so I could show him that I get it now. I would let him read those dragon books all year and never try to force him to conform to my transitory reading goals for him. I would look for ways to use the books he does read to meet my instructional goals, like I do now.

  Randy read every day, committed to his own vision of what reading meant to him and unwilling to compromise with external forces like teachers that infringed on his core reading values. This should have been enough for me. Randy is what a real reader looks like, and my efforts to force him to conform to my short-term goals for his reading when he was already on the path to a lifelong identity as a reader were futile. Underground readers who do or don’t comply
with the teacher’s concept of what reading is should not have to wait for lunchtime, summer break, or graduation for their reading life to begin.

  I only have to look at my classroom now to see how far this change of attitude has taken me. Once I accepted that my primary aim was to instill the life habits of readers in all of my students, habits that students like Randy already had, my teaching finally aligned with my life view of what reading should look like for readers. This vision extends beyond students sitting in reading class and encompasses the reading identities students already possess when walking into my classroom. One such underground reader, Alex, educated himself for years by being a covert classroom reader. Free to read whatever he wanted, Alex declared our class “reading heaven.” He persisted reading books propped inside his desk all year, even though he didn’t have to. I teased him, declaring that since I had invented this trick thirty years ago, he owed me royalties every time he did it.

  Testing the Teacher

  The fact is that scores of the children who enter our classrooms are students who like to read or once did, before years of traditional reading instruction focused on comprehension worksheets, book reports, and whole-class novel units made the experience of reading boring and painful. Michelle’s reading reflection entry reveals her beliefs about reading prior to my class:

  When you told us that you expected us to read 40 books this year, my first thought was: She. Is. Crazy. I used to hate to read more than Aunt Eleanor’s potato salad (and believe me, that stuff is pretty nasty). I think part of it was the fact that the only books I read last year were books that the school required us to read. We would do worksheet upon worksheet of reviews and vocabulary on every single chapter.

  That I expect my students to read forty books a year is not the chief concern for many students. They usually want to know what activities I will ask them to do with the books they are reading, because worksheets, vocabulary tests, and book reports have always been the goal for every book they have ever read in school; never has it been for their pleasure or engagement. They have a tough time believing that I have not tied their books to a lot of teacher strings, so they quiz me, looking for the catch:

  “How will you be grading this, Mrs. Miller?”

  “Don’t worry about grades. If you keep reading, you’ll be fine.”

  “May I read books from home or only yours?”

  “First, these are our books, yours and mine. Second, yes, you may read books from home.”

  “How will you know that we are really reading?”

  “Trust me, I will know.”

  They don’t have much confidence in me. If I am not going to quiz them on every book and monitor their every reading move, how will I control reading for them? School, for them, is about performing to the teacher’s expectations and doing the work that the teacher requires.

  Our students have no background in how a class can be different. They begin each school year filled with hope that this year will be more interesting and engaging than the last, and yet, the drudgery that surrounds reading continues, year in, year out. It takes time for students to get to know me and trust me and then to believe that they have as much reading freedom as I claim they do. When faced with the wall of books in my classroom, Corbin didn’t feel anticipation; he felt dread:

  I remember the moment perfectly, Meet the Teacher night, I walk into my LA & SS [Language Arts and Social Studies] room and all I see are books. Then Mrs. Miller walks up and says we have a 40 book requirement. The first thing that pops into my mind is—book reports.

  Conditions for Learning

  What I did not know when I started teaching was that no matter how dynamic and well planned my instruction was, if my classroom was not a motivational environment for readers, my instruction was doomed to fail. Based on decades of classroom observations on the conditions that foster learning, Australian researcher Brian Cambourne identifies the following factors that contribute to successful learning:

  • Immersion: Students need to be surrounded with books of all kinds and given the opportunity to read them every day. Conversations about reading—what is being read and what students are getting from their books—need to be an ongoing event. In my classroom, students have access to hundreds of books of all genres and reading levels and encouragement to read widely.

  • Demonstrations: Students require abundant demonstrations on the structure and features of texts, how to use texts for different learning goals, and how to access the information in them. I teach daily reading lessons using authentic texts like books, articles, and textbooks, designing every lesson around the skills that readers really need to develop reading proficiency.

  • Expectations: Students will rise to the level of a teacher’s expectations. I expect my students to read every day and to read a large volume of books. Not only do I have high expectations for reading, I have high expectations for students’ success. They are never given messages, either explicitly or implicitly, that I do not think they can accomplish any reading task.

  • Responsibility: Students need to make at least some of their own choices when pursuing learning goals. Cambourne states, “Learners who lose the ability to make choices become disempowered.” I set reading requirements for my students at a certain number of books per genre, but students have the freedom to choose which books they will read in order to fulfill the requirements.

  • Employment: Students need time to practice what they are learning in the context of realistic situations. Every single lesson that I teach circles back to students’ own reading, and students are given time daily to apply the skills they acquire to their own books, content-area reading, and research assignments.

  • Approximations: Students need to receive encouragement for the skills and knowledge they do have and be allowed to make mistakes as they work toward mastery. I help students find books that are at their own reading level, even if it is below grade level, and publicly celebrate each reader’s accomplishments as he or she moves toward more mature reading ability.

  • Response: Students need nonthreatening, immediate feedback on their progress. By holding frequent conferences, requiring written response letters about their books, and discussing students’ reading with them daily, I am continually providing encouragement, guidance, and validation for their reading development.

  • Engagement: Even with all of the other conditions in place, engagement is the most important condition for learning and must exist in a successful classroom. Reading must be an endeavor that

  • Has personal value to students: Do students see a reason to read outside of the need to do so for school? Do students find any enjoyment in reading, or is it just a job?

  • Students see themselves as capable of doing: Do students see themselves as readers or nonreaders? Are they discouraged by reading failure in the past? Do they see themselves as able to learn to read well?

  • Is free from anxiety: Is reading weighted down with so many requirements for performance that reading is connected in students’ minds with an obstacle course of work and, therefore, with stress? Have students been punished for not meeting mandates for reading at school?

  • Is modeled by someone they like, respect, trust, and want to emulate: Does the teacher model reading habits in his or her life? Do students respect the teacher as someone knowledgeable about reading? Has the teacher communicated to students that he or she sees students as capable enough to make some learning decisions?

  I no longer spend the majority of my planning time crafting those glorious novel units. Instead, I focus my efforts on designing a classroom environment that engages my students, based on Cambourne’s conditions for learning. We can spend hours determining what students should know and be able to do, crafting instruction to accomplish the desired results, but without considering students’ right to an engaging, trustworthy, risk-free place in which to learn, what we teach will always fall short. Students must believe that they can read and that reading is worth learning how t
o do well. We have to build a community that embraces every student and provides acceptance and encouragement no matter where students are on the reading curve.

  WHISPER

  Student Surveys

  SIGHING, I SHUT MY DOOR at the end of the day and enjoy the quiet of my second home, my classroom. It is the first week of school, and unaccustomed to talking and standing all day, my throat and feet are sore. I wander over to my desk, collapse a little too hard into my chair, and begin thumbing through the surveys my new students filled out in class.

  Two piles await me. One is a stack of Reading Interest-A-Lyzer surveys. Created by Sally Reis, based on a form by Joseph S. Renzulli, the surveys ask students to describe their reading habits and their ideal language arts class. The other stack contains general interest surveys, modified versions of a survey created by Susan Weinbrenner (see Figure 2.1 and 2.2). Topics range from students’ preferences in books, movies, and television programs to which famous people they would like to interview. Teachers frequently use interest surveys as a means to gain insight into the preferences and personalities of their students. In addition, I analyze these surveys for information that will help me encourage my students to read.