The Book Whisperer

by Donalyn Miller

  I have fond memories of reading Inkheart, too, and I am pleased that Molly enjoys it as much as I had hoped. My curiosity about her personal connections with the book forms the basis for my response:

  Dear Molly,

  I enjoyed Inkheart, too! It is one of my favorite books (I know I say this all of the time, but I mean it!). I have never read a book which explores the power of reading to change your life (both negatively and positively) in such an interesting way. I always ask readers of Inkheart which book they would read themselves into if they could. Do you have a favorite story you would like to visit? Which character is your favorite? Can you guess who mine is? Inkspell is wonderful, and certainly worth reading, but you might want to take a break between Inkheart and the sequel. Both books are so long!

  No inauthenticity here; obviously, I have read Inkheart. My conversational tone with Molly about a book we have both enjoyed and my advice about reading Inkspell reinforces our bond as readers. I ask Molly high-level comprehension questions that require her to evaluate and analyze the book and her impressions of it.

  These letters are exchanges between a more experienced reader and a less experienced reader, not a list of questions probing whether or not Molly read the book. I challenge Molly to think more deeply about the book, but from the stance of a more advanced reader who read Inkheart, too. Readers whispering back and forth about their reading experiences—this is how reading should look.

  CHAPTER 5

  Walking the Walk

  When I look back, I am so impressed again with the

  life-giving power of literature. If I were a young

  person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the

  world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did

  when I was young.

  —Maya Angelou

  I feel really bad about all those good books out there waiting for me to read them.

  —Parker

  RETURNING FROM WINTER BREAK, my students gather around me in the hall. “Well, did you make it?” Madison asks me, referring to my goal of reading one book for each of the twelve days of the holiday.

  “No, I didn’t. I only read eight.”

  “Only eight? Only eight,” Jon laughs at me, shaking his head.

  “Yeah, I got bogged down in a book I wasn’t enjoying, and I started to read less so that I wouldn’t have to deal with it,” I admit.

  “What book was it, Mrs. Miller?” someone asks.

  “The True Meaning of Smekday— it’s on a lot of hot book lists for this year, and it’s about alien invasion; you would have thought it would have been more exciting, but it just drags and drags.”

  Stacey pipes up, “That happened to me when I tried to read Uglies. I know that all of the girls rave about that book, but I just couldn’t get into it.”

  Turning back to me, Madison asks, “So, what did you do?”

  “I set it off to the side and read The Higher Power of Lucky instead! Hey, Riley, I finished Marly’s Ghost, too; thanks for recommending it to me. I loved it, but it was sad!”

  Riley laughs, “I know!”

  “Does anyone else want to read Smekday?” I ask them. “I bet it would be good for another reader, but I am going to abandon it.”

  Several students clamor to get the book from me, and I pass it on. My students like to read the books that I read and recommend to them, but they also like to read the books that I have abandoned and prove me wrong. A few years back, Jared strutted around the entire year because he read and loved The Last Book in the Universe, by Rodman Philbrick, a speculation on a possible future without books. I had renamed this book The Last Book I Will Ever Finish because I had abandoned it twice. Jared declared it was one of his favorites and got several other students to read it, too.

  The Need for Reading Role Models: The Crux of the Reading Crisis

  My credibility with students and the reason they trust me when I recommend books to them stems from the fact that I read every day of my life and that I talk about reading constantly. I am not mandating an activity for them that I do not engage in myself. I do not promote reading to my students because it is good for them or because it is required for school success. I advocate reading because it is enjoyable and enriching. When my students think about me in the future, I want them to remember me as a reader with a book in my hand and a recommendation on my lips.

  The relationships I build with my students are predominantly those of one reader to another. I am so enthusiastic about reading, so joyful about books, so willing to share my opinions and my reading experiences that my students are swept up in my love of books and want to feel it for themselves. We talk about books together all day, from the first moment I greet students in the hall until we pack up books to read at home each night. My students laugh at me when I stagger into class bleary-eyed and tell them that I stayed up too late reading my latest book. They may laugh, but they also see that reading is something I value enough to lose sleep over.

  Findings from a 2007 Associated Press poll, reported in the Washington Post, indicate that the average adult American read only four books that entire year. This statistic does not tell the whole story; of the adults who read, their average was seven books, but 25 percent of the respondents did not read a book at all (Fram, 2007). Teachers fare no better on surveys of adult reading behaviors than the general population; in the 2004 article “The Peter Effect,” Anthony and Mary Applegate report that of the preservice teachers whom they studied, 54.3 percent were unenthusiastic about reading, leaving little hope that these teachers would be able to inspire students to engage in an activity they themselves did not enjoy. This data is all the more alarming when you consider that “one of the key factors in motivating students to read is a teacher who values reading and is enthusiastic about sharing a love of reading with students” (Gambrell, 1996). What is going on here? Why aren’t adults, even teachers, reading, and what is this doing to our students?

  We have created a culture of reading poverty in which a vicious cycle of aliteracy has the potential to devolve into illiteracy for many students. By allowing students to pass through our classrooms without learning to love reading, we are creating adults (who then become parents and teachers) who don’t read much. They may be capable of reading well enough to perform academic and informational reading, but they do not love to read and have few life reading habits to model for children.

  Who will be our future role models for reading if we don’t produce any from our classrooms? It is popular to blame parents for their children’s disengagement from reading, but even parents who read to their children, take them to libraries, and model good reading habits at home have difficulty overcoming a reading wasteland in their children’s classrooms, where teachers may not read. Under these circumstances, there is little opportunity for their children to develop lifelong reading habits at school. When I walk into my daughter’s third-grade classroom on Meet the Teacher night and don’t see a single book for students to read in sight, I know that this year role modeling for independent reading is going to come from me, not her new teacher. What about students who do not have parents who read? What about the parents who never learned to love reading themselves and have little to offer their own children in the way of being a role model for reading? Who takes responsibility for them?

  Teachers bemoan students’ lack of reading experiences before they enter school and students’ lack of support for their reading at home. But teachers never seem to take ownership of the fact that the parents of these students, the very individuals we believe should be role models for reading, were once our students, too. When students walk into my classroom having never read a book or when their reading diet consists solely of The Day My Butt Went Psycho and Garfield cartoons, I know that there is an absence of knowledgeable, enthusiastic role models for reading in their lives—not just in their homes, but in their classrooms, too. Readers are made, not born. Few students spring out of the ground fully formed as readers. They need help
, and we cannot assume that they will get it from home, but they should always get it from us, their teachers.

  What Does Reading Mean to You?

  There is evidence that a teacher’s views on what reading is affect students’ perceptions of reading and their long-term interest in it, too. Rosenblatt’s transactional theory—which analyzes how readers approach a text and what purpose they have for reading it—defines two types of readers: efferent readers and aesthetic readers. Teachers who take an efferent stance see reading as a way to acquire knowledge, diving into a text for the purpose of getting information out of it. These teachers present reading as a series of skills to be mastered, processes to be fine-tuned and applied in order to collect information. There are a million and one books that show teachers this nuts-and-bolts approach to teaching reading. I see this skill-based approach as an outside-to-inside way of reading, a method of attacking each reading event with a to-do list of strategies in the hope that this will lead students to comprehension.

  Teachers who take an aesthetic stance to reading—in other words, those who see reading as an emotional and intellectual journey—approach literacy instruction differently. This inside-to-outside look at reading considers each reader’s personal impressions of what they read and their tastes and preferences. Both methodologies have benefits when working with young readers; after all, readers access texts for different purposes, both informational and experiential, in turn.

  You needn’t look any further than a classroom to see these alternating philosophies at work. Are the children capable of reading well enough for academic purposes? Do they spend much time pleasure reading in class? How many of the students choose to read outside of school? Do the teachers read? Most teachers who are not readers themselves take a skills-based approach. They may never talk to their students about loving books and craving reading, but tell them instead about the need to read well to get along in school and in life. But when you consider that the teachers who have an aesthetic view of reading have the greatest influence on their students’ motivation and interest in reading (Ruddell, 1995) and have more impact on the long-term reading habits of their students than those who see reading as a skill to be mastered, the instructional edge goes to the teacher who sees reading as a gift, not a goal.

  The Teacher Leads the Way

  Motivation to read and attitudes toward reading are not the only areas in which teachers’ reading habits and views on reading affect their students’ reading behaviors. Lundberg and Linnakyla (1993, cited in Applegate and Applegate, 2004) found a link between the reading habits of teachers and the reading achievement of their students. When my principal interviews candidates for a teaching position at my school, regardless of whether it’s a language arts position, he always asks them to discuss the last book they read. He recognizes the importance of putting role models for reading in front of students every day. While teaching preparation programs impart methodologies for reading pedagogy to teachers, my principal recognizes that our lives as readers are a powerful component in our ability to teach reading, too.

  Students need lots of modeling and practice in how to read different types of texts, but showing them how to read is not the only act we must model for our students. If we want our students to read and enjoy it for the rest of their lives, then we must show them what a reading life looks like. If our reading experiences inform our views on what reading is, it is helpful to evaluate our reading attitudes and behaviors.

  Finding Your Inner Reader

  In taking a look at your self-reflection responses, what have you learned about yourself as a reader? Is reading just a tool to access information and be successful in school and work, or is it also a pleasurable escape for you? Consider how your view of reading seeps into your classroom and colors your instruction. Is your view of reading reflected in the literacy activities you use with students? If you see reading as a tool, try to incorporate opportunities for your students to read for pleasure, too.

  If you have negative memories of reading in school as a child, how do these experiences show up in your teaching? You may not see the value of reading as a pleasurable endeavor because you were never inspired to read for enjoyment. It is also possible that your negative experiences as a young reader have steeled your resolve to do a better job of motivating your own students. It may be the reason you became a teacher! Share your reading struggles with your students, and describe how you overcame them.

  If you have fond memories of reading as a child, how do you share these memories with your students? How has your early love of reading carried into your adult life? If it hasn’t, why not? Take a look at why you no longer enjoy reading as much as you did or no longer carve out time to do it.

  SELF-REFLECTION ACTIVITY

  What were your reading experiences as a child?

  Were these positive or negative experiences for you?

  Do you see yourself as a reader now?

  How do you share your reading experiences—both current experiences and those from the past—with your students?

  With which group of readers in your classroom do you most identify—the underground readers, the developing readers, or the dormant readers?

  Who have been your role models for reading?

  List the last five books you have read.

  How long did it take for you to read these books?

  Which books were read for a job or for a school-related purpose?

  Which books were read for pleasure?

  If you are still an enthusiastic reader, I imagine that you can point to some positive experiences with books as a child, even if these encounters did not occur at school. I can close my eyes and bring up Garth Williams’s illustrations in my much-read copy of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House in the Big Woods. My sisters and I still laugh when remembering our attempts to live like pioneers in our backyard after reading the Little House books. When recommending A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeline L’Engle, to my students, I share with them that I did a book report on it in seventh grade, complete with a demonstration of a tesseract—using string to represent the folding of time and space, just like in the book. My lifelong obsession with fantasy and science fiction began with this book. I still list both books on my top ten favorites list, although I have read thousands of books since.

  If you do love to read but never share this with your students, why not? Don’t do what I did in those first few years and leave your inner reader at home because you are afraid that no one at your school will get what you are doing. We don’t want our students to compartmentalize their reading lives—one for school and one for home—and we should not do it, either. Your love of reading is the best part of you. You can use your knowledge of reading and books to forge connections with students who are still forming a self-concept as readers and need a strong role model to follow. It is the most important resource you bring to class each day.

  Reading Improvement Plan

  Even if you have never been an avid reader or have lost your zeal for reading over the years, it is not too late to develop a love of reading. “Fake it until you make it,” and take an academic stance if it helps. Craft your own reading plan. If you’re having trouble getting started, here are some steps you can take:

  • Commit to a certain amount of reading per day: When I am on the road at a conference or at a speaking engagement, I often hear teachers proclaim that they do not have time to read, but I believe that we can always find time for what we value. Set aside fifteen minutes per day while dinner is cooking or when you are on the treadmill. Can you get up fifteen minutes earlier or stay up fifteen minutes later? How about when you are waiting for your children at soccer or ballet practice? Do you have time during your commute? Why not read during your bus or train ride, as my husband does? I read at night after our daughters are in bed. Grab a few minutes in class each day, and read alongside your students.

  • Choose books to read that are personally interesting to you: Resist the urge to choose a book b
ecause you think you can use it later for school. The same goes for reading books on pedagogy or a topic you may teach. This reading plan is about finding the joy in reading, not work. If you cannot find any books that interest you, talk to colleagues or friends who read more than you and ask them for recommendations. Check out displays in bookstores and libraries, too. Join a book club, or start one with your colleagues. Start reading book reviews.

  • Read more books for children: If you loved to read as a child, revisit the types of books that you fell in love with in the first place. I like to read children’s books because the stories and the characters are more innocent and pure than those I find in adult fiction. Plus, these books almost always end happily! If you did not learn to love to read as a child, you were cheated out of a joyful experience. Reclaim it. My friend Jen Robinson, author of the Web site “Jen Robinson’s Book Page,” has a powerful argument for why adults should read more children’s books. According to Jen, adults who did not read as children have missed out on part of their cultural heritage, the opportunity for inspiration, and a means of communication with the young people in their lives. Even though she is not a classroom teacher, Jen’s views reflect what life readers know.