The Book Whisperer

by Donalyn Miller

  In order to make personal reading recommendations to my students, I need to learn about their past reading experiences and their interests both in and out of school. I mine these surveys for nuggets of information that will form the basis for book recommendations. Students may not be able to describe what types of books they might like to read, but if I have knowledge of their personal interests, I will be able find books that match a topic they enjoy.

  FIGURE 2.1: Example of a Student’s Response to a Teacher’s Survey

  Source: Christina, grade 6.

  FIGURE 2.2: Example of a Student’s Response to a Teacher’s Survey

  Source: Rachel, grade 6.

  Shutting out the sounds of lockers slamming shut from the hallway, I focus on what whispers to me from their words. How can I reach each one through books? What books can I recommend that will inspire them to read more? What insight can I glean from the answers they have so dutifully recorded? Holding each child in my mind as I read, I try to match my initial observations of them with their written comments.

  Christina

  She is bouncy like Tigger, with an easy laugh and a cheerful personality. Even her ponytail bounces. Christina is smart, but she is already learning to mask her intelligence in the manner that so many adolescent girls do. I have noticed that she is not that enthusiastic about reading. Scanning her survey, I look for clues that will help me find enticing books for her.

  What type of TV programs do you prefer? Why?

  I like the soccer channels because I can learn new soccer moves.

  What is your first choice about what to do when you have free time at home?

  I practice soccer with my dad.

  If you could talk to any person currently living, who would it be? Why?

  I would talk to Mia Hamm because she is really cool.

  Identifying Christina as a soccer fanatic is an understatement. She even lists Argentina as the country she would most like to visit because, she explained later, they have an “awesome” soccer team! I also notice that she lists English as her least favorite subject. Connecting her with books that tie in with her love for soccer is my obvious first step. Thinking for a moment, I remember that I purchased an Eyewitness: Soccer book over the summer because so many students in my class last year expressed an interest in the sport. Finding the book, I jot a note on a Post-it, asking Christina if she would like to be the first to read it. Since she is in my morning class, I walk over to her desk and put the book and note on top.

  Rachel

  Rachel is smart, like Christina, but she doesn’t care if everyone knows it. Confident and easygoing, with a sharp wit, Rachel is a student others gravitate toward. I think she is good at being a social chameleon. She fits in well with other kids, but I wonder whether she shows much of who she really is. I wonder about this because it is hard to pin down her preferences from her survey answers (see Figure 2.2).

  If you could have anything you want, regardless of money or natural ability, what would you choose?

  If I could have anything that I wanted I would have World Peace and the ability to fly....

  What career(s) do you think might be suitable for you when you are an adult?

  I think that a career in comedy or acting would be suitable. . . .

  Although Rachel would pack books on a fifteen-year trip in space and spends time reading with her family, she lists language arts as her least favorite class. I wonder what the story is there. Perhaps she is an underground reader who has separated her reading life from her school life. I know from talking to her that she did not read much last year. If I could get her to read more, her influence with other students would help spread the reading vibe. I walk over to the class library across the room and start building a preview stack for Rachel, pulling books about kids like her, kids who have more to them than meets the eye: Paul from Tangerine, Wringer’s Palmer, The Misfits’ Bobby and Addie, and my favorite loser-hero, Alfred Kropp. I build a tower of books and put them on her desk, too. She can preview the stack tomorrow and choose which books appeal to her.

  I continue this process for an hour, channeling my gut and heart observations of the children, reading and rereading surveys, wandering back and forth in front of our book bins and grabbing book after book after book. For students in my morning class, I stack books right on their desk. For the afternoon group, I line the counter behind my desk with piles of books, Post-its marking the intended recipients. I will continue tomorrow and every day after until I have made preview stacks or pulled select titles for all sixty of my new students. Their needs as readers, as people, call to me from the pages of those surveys, and I whisper back with books.

  CHAPTER 3

  There’s a Time and a Place

  No matter how busy you may think you are, you must

  find time for reading, or surrender yourself to

  self-chosen ignorance.

  —Atwood H. Townsend

  I read in class and that influences me reading everywhere else.

  —Marilyn

  SITTING CROSS-LEGGED on my bed, covers up to my chin, I am reading Anna Quindlen’s Black and Blue, the story of a woman in an abusive marriage. The book is well written and riveting, and I just can’t put it down. An annoying knock at the door pulls me out of my book, and I call out two words familiar to my loved ones: “Last chapter!” Swap Quindlen’s novel for E. L. Doctorow’s historical narrative Ragtime, and it could be me two decades ago. No matter what else I may have to do—grade papers, fold laundry, or catch up on e-mails—the siren call of my books is always there, luring me back. Reflecting on her own lifelong obsession with reading, Quindlen writes in How Reading Changed My Life, “Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.” I know that my life is marked by the road signs of my beloved books, each one symbolizing who I was when I read it, shaping who I have become. The uninitiated might say that I am lost in my books, but I know I am more found than lost.

  This is what I want for my students, to lose and find themselves in books. During their own busy days of soccer practices, Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, homework, and chores, they have little free time to read, so I must make sure that I give them time to read in class every day. After all, if I do not make time for them to read in school, why should they make time for it in their life?

  How much time are we talking about? My class starts every day with independent reading time. At the beginning of the school year, this time may be as little as fifteen minutes. I want students to get used to the routine of starting our class this way. At the beginning of the year, before I start my conferences with them on a regular basis, I read, too. Students need a reading role model in front of them. I also want to make it clear to them that reading time is not an opportunity to talk to me about their homework or ask to go to the band hall. Nor is it free time to take care of personal errands or clean out a binder. Reading time is for reading. I value this experience so much that I set aside time for it every day, no matter what else we are doing. I joke to my students that if we had a twenty-minute class, it would be spent reading.

  Time for Reading Is Time Well Spent

  Reading in class makes me read more

  at home and on the weekends

  because if I am caught in a book, I

  HAVE TO FINISH IT.

  —Molly

  I express to my students that reading is not an add-on to the class. It is the cornerstone. The books we are reading and what we notice and wonder about our books feeds all of the instruction and learning in the class. At first, this reading time is my mandate for them. They read because I tell them to. I want to instill in them the daily habit. Like brushing their teeth, reading is a responsibility that my students understand I expect them to assume. Yet time spent reading feeds more reading. The more my students read, and grow into a community of readers, the more they want to read. As we move into the year full swing, I set aside a little more time each day for independent rea
ding. By springtime, students spend about thirty minutes of our ninety-minute language arts block reading their independent books. My students do not even realize how much time they are reading each day. But I do know how much they value the time I give them to read because of all the groans and complaints I get when I announce that reading time is over. I often hear, “Mrs. Miller, can we have a day where we just read for the whole class?” In the spring, when half of my class was away at a band competition, we did just that!

  No matter how long students spend engaged in direct reading instruction, without time to apply what they learn in the context of real reading events, students will never build capacity as readers. Without spending increasingly longer periods of time reading, they won’t build endurance as readers, either. Students need time to read and time to be readers.

  In The Power of Reading, his meta-analysis of research investigating independent reading over the past forty years, Stephen Krashen reveals that no single literacy activity has a more positive effect on students’ comprehension, vocabulary knowledge, spelling, writing ability, and overall academic achievement than free voluntary reading. By loading the instructional day with traditional drill-and-kill activities such as weekly spelling and vocabulary lists and tests, grammar workbook exercises, and low-level comprehension assignments, all of which have a minimal or, in many cases, negative impact on student achievement, Krashen asserts that we are denying students access to the one activity that has been proven over and over again to increase their language acquisition and competence as communicators: again, free, voluntary reading. I have observed that my students are more likely to read a book at home that they have started reading at school. Free reading also liberates underground readers so they do not have to switch back and forth between their book for school and their own book.

  I think it is great that we get to read in class each day. Sometimes, the best part of my day is getting to read for half an hour.

  —Bethany

  The question can no longer be “How can we make time for independent reading?” The question must be “How can we not?” Since making independent reading the core of the reading program in my classroom, I have witnessed an increase in student achievement as well as a sharp increase in student motivation and engagement. Students like Kelsey who have failed the state assessments pass them after a year of heavy reading. Students who previously had never read more than the few books they were required to read for class read book after book. What are the effects of intensive reading? Better writing, richer vocabularies, and increased background knowledge in social studies and science are natural outgrowths of all of the reading my students do.

  I try to take every chance I get to read in school because mostly school is quite boring. When I read in class it fills up the little hole in my heart (JUST KIDDING!!!).

  —Jon

  Even if traditional instruction were able to provide equivalent gains, the improvement in students’ attitude toward reading would be cause enough to devote substantial time to independent reading. My former students come back and tell me that time to read their own books in class is almost nonexistent in middle school and high school. Why aren’t we giving students more time for independent reading in class? I hear many teachers say that they cannot set aside time for students to read because they have so much content to cover, but to what end? Because reading has more impact on students’ achievement than any other activity in school, setting aside time for reading must be the first activity we teachers write on our lesson plans, not the last. It is said that we make time for what we value, and if we value reading, we must make time for it.

  Stealing Reading Moments

  Resolve to edge in a little reading every day, if it is but a single sentence. If you gain fifteen minutes a day, it will make itself felt at the end of the year.

  —Horace Mann

  Dedicating a large part of the instructional block for independent reading may seem impossible in our current standards-based world of high-stakes testing, but it is not. Even if you must follow a district- or school-mandated program that includes scripted drill activities and a lockstep curriculum, you can make time for independent reading. Thanks to a savvy principal, I have support for designing my entire class around independent reading, but I know that others may not have this freedom. There are creative ways, however, to carve out extra reading time for your students, even if you have a very structured routine, just by maximizing the moments of a typical class day.

  Classroom Interruptions

  I teach two double blocks of language arts and social studies per day, about two hours and thirty minutes of instructional time per class. Recently, I tracked the interruptions of my classroom instructional time over the course of a week. I logged fourteen visits from office personnel to deliver messages, forgotten lunches, and notes that needed to go home; nine phone calls from other staff members; two hallway discussions of student behavior; and one impromptu parent conference. All told, my students and I lost forty minutes of instructional time that week, and this is at a school that makes an effort to limit interruptions during the class day. This list is not atypical for most teachers—no doubt, you recognize each of these distractions. And each time these interruptions occur, we have to stop teaching and then regain our footing in order to pick up where we left off. The greater issue of limiting classroom interruptions is a systemic one, but how to recoup lost time with students is within a teacher’s reach.

  In the first few years of my teaching, nothing filled me with dread the way that a ringing classroom telephone or knock on the door did. Not only did I lose my train of thought, but it was hard to pick up the thread of my students’ engagement when we had to stop and start again. I also struggled to keep one eye on my visitor and one eye on students who might take advantage of the situation and misbehave. Maintaining control of a classroom when I am distracted by interruptions requires that my expectations for students’ behavior be clear so that my students know what to do. During the early weeks of school, my students practice getting out their books when there are classroom interruptions. I start by prompting students to read when we are interrupted, but as the year progresses, students internalize this procedure, first as a habit, but eventually as a desire to steal more reading time. Their books call to them all of the time now, too, you see.

  Bell Ringers and Warm-Ups

  When evaluating an instructional practice, I first ask myself, “What purpose does this activity serve?” No matter how flashy, fun, or pervasive in classrooms an activity is, my overarching goal is to increase students’ reading ability. Any pursuit that does not accomplish this specific goal goes out the window.

  Like a lot of teachers, I used to prepare assignments such as editing exercises or writing prompts and have them on the overhead projector for my students to complete as they entered the classroom. On the surface, these activities were designed to engage students in some sort of literacy instruction or practice, but we all know what a bell ringer or warm-up is truly meant to do: get students in their seats, quiet and working, as soon as possible. Evaluating these activities with a critical eye, I realized that every nonreading activity was wasting precious minutes of reading time daily.

  Take a look at a common classroom warm-up lesson: students are asked to look for grammatical and punctuation errors in a scripted sentence. Correcting the sentence may take five minutes. Discussing their corrections with students and providing feedback might take another ten minutes. Considering how little of this direct grammar instruction actually transfers to students’ writing (Alsup & Bush, 2003; Thomas & Tchudi, 1999; and Weaver, 1996), these fifteen minutes would be better spent reading, an activity that has been shown to improve students’ writing and grammar (Elley, 1991, cited in Krashen, 2004).

  With instructional time at a premium in every classroom, we cannot afford to waste any of it. Research has confirmed that independent reading is the better use of our time. Students in my class enter my classroom each day, get out their
books, and start reading. Not only are students quiet and working (the implicit goal of all warm-up activities), but they are engaged in a productive endeavor that improves their reading performance. The amount of time I save by not having to plan and grade ineffective warm-up drills is icing on the cake.

  My intention is not to disparage the activities that you may use as class openers; some of them may have instructional value, but I challenge you to find anything that has more impact on reading achievement than independent reading.