The Book Whisperer

by Donalyn Miller

  A Closer Look at Round-Robin Reading

  Let’s take a look at what is really going on during round-robin reading: Billy is called on to read a section from the social studies textbook. Billy, who is not a strong reader, labors to get through the passage, halting when he comes to words he does not know until he gets prompting from the teacher and, most likely, other students. He is embarrassed by his poor reading ability, and the frustration he senses from the other students. Everyone, including Billy, is relieved when he is done. Billy does not remember much of what he read because he did not understand it, but it doesn’t matter. He does not continue to follow along with the class. He has already been called on to read once, and is safe for another day.

  I suppose that we could avoid humiliating developing readers by not asking them to read aloud, but the picture is not any better for the capable readers.

  Susie, who is a wonderful reader, whips through her section with few problems. The developing readers, who cannot keep up with the pace of Susie’s reading, are lost. Even if Susie reads the text fluently, it is likely that some students do not have enough background knowledge of the topic or the vocabulary to comprehend what she is reading. Susie, whose primary goal is to dazzle the class with how much better she reads than Billy, does not pay much attention to what she reads, either. Once she finishes her part, Susie does not follow along with the rest of the class, but reads ahead because she can.

  The popcorn popper continues, readers burn out one by one, and comprehension breaks down for everyone in the room.

  I can’t believe that any teacher, after reflecting on how this method of group reading really plays out in a classroom, would still use it. To assume that all students are following along is false. Think back to episodes when the student who was called on to read was obviously not following along and needed prompting to find the proper place to start. Poor readers dread getting called on to read, and good readers are bored by laboring through the reading of slower, less capable readers than themselves. Round-robin reading does nothing to foster a feeling of reading success in any but the best readers, and it doesn’t build anyone’s oral reading ability or fluency, either.

  Alternative: Prepare and Practice for Oral Reading

  It is important for students to practice reading aloud in order to develop confidence and fluent oral reading ability, so how can we encourage students to read aloud, but avoid the negatives of round-robin and popcorn reading?

  • Preview the text before you read it. Point out to students the features of the text, such as visuals or vocabulary, that students will need to understand in order to comprehend the passage. Determine what they already know about the material, and pre-teach any concepts or vocabulary they do not know but will need for comprehension.

  • Assign students a section to read ahead of time, and give them time to practice reading it. Reading a piece of text silently a few times will improve students’ ability to read the text aloud later. If students can read the text aloud a few times, too, that’s even better.

  Alternative: Substitutes for Oral Reading

  We need to consider whether we are asking students to read orally because we see a benefit for them in this practice or because it is a time-saver or a work saver for the teacher. Reading texts orally as a class takes a huge amount of time that we can little afford to waste on an activity that does not improve students’ reading ability. There are better methods for increasing students’ fluency than round-robin reading, including share-reading as I suggested earlier in this chapter. Here are some additional ideas:

  • Pair each student with a buddy, and let the two students read the text together. Choose partners that are close to the same reading ability. Match developing readers or English language learners with students who read on grade level. Do not pair your lowest readers with your most gifted ones. High-ability students resent being used as tutors, and they, too, deserve the ability to grow as readers—something they will not be able to accomplish by reading with readers who are less capable than they are. True, developing readers need the support of a better reader as a model, but giving them a racehorse reader to work with will only feed their sense of reading inadequacy.

  • Use unabridged audiotapes, CDs, or podcasts. Students will have a fluent reading model to follow along with, and the teacher will not have to read the same text six times in one day. Trust me, my students will tell you that author Gary Soto’s Spanish-accented rendition of the song “La Bamba” in his short story of the same name is much better than mine! As students listen to the audio, you can stop the recording at key points in the text or replay sections for discussion purposes. School librarians can often locate audiotapes or CDs for many children’s books. Many publishers now include CDs of textbooks in ancillary packages, and online services such as TumbleTalkingBooks (http://www.tumblebooks.com/talkingbooks/) and Audible (www.audible.com) offer a huge selection of book podcasts.

  Traditional Practice: Incentive Programs

  Shortly after Thanksgiving break, I greet my students with a stack of papers. “Ladies and gentlemen, I have the packets for the Six Flags Reading Contest. You may have participated in this contest before. If you read 360 minutes between now and February 15, you can earn a free student ticket to Six Flags.”

  Corbin is incredulous: “Three hundred and sixty minutes between now and February 15? Mrs. Miller, we will read more than that in a month.”

  “That’s true, Corbin. My feeling is that if you are already doing the reading, you might as well get the free ticket.”

  Daniel, my entrepreneur, asks, “If we read more, can we get more tickets?”

  “No, Daniel, just the one.”

  Brittany whines, “Do we have to keep that lame log to get the ticket? I don’t care about the ticket if I have to keep that log.”

  “Hey guys, you are already doing the reading. Getting the ticket is a nice bonus, don’t you think? I will keep a folder on my desk for the Six Flags logs, and when you complete yours, stick it in the file. I will turn them in to Ms. Taylor [the school librarian] when it is a little closer to the due date.” Someone digs out a calculator to see how many days of in-class and nightly reading they have to complete in order to rack up 360 minutes.

  “Let’s see, if I read at least twenty minutes a day in class and twenty minutes a day at home, it will take me nine days to read 360 minutes. Hey, Mrs. Miller, how much time do we have?”

  “Two months or so. I imagine that most of you will be done before winter break.”

  I am grateful to Six Flags and our librarian for administering a program that promotes reading. I think their goal of rewarding students for reading by giving them a fun day at an exciting theme park is a noble one. What I take issue with is the embarrassingly little amount of reading that students are expected to accomplish over an extended period of time in order to earn a reward. In addition, I have never observed a student who developed a long-term reading habit because of an incentive program. Even if students are somehow motivated to read because of the ticket, free pizza, or other prize, odds are that they will abandon reading as soon as the incentive is earned. Unfortunately, the only purpose these programs serve is to convince students there is no innate value in reading and that it is only worth doing if there is a prize attached.

  Alternative: Reading Bestows Gifts on the Reader

  I want my students to learn what life readers know: reading is its own reward. Reading is a university course in life; it makes us smarter by increasing our vocabulary and background knowledge of countless topics. Reading allows us to travel to destinations that we will never experience outside of the pages of a book. Reading is a way to find friends who have the same problems we do and who can give advice on solving those problems. Through reading, we can witness all that is noble, beautiful, or horrifying about other human beings. From a book’s characters, we can learn how to conduct ourselves. And most of all, reading is a communal act that connects you to other readers, comrades who have travele
d to the same remarkable places that you have and been changed by them, too.

  Rewarding reading with prizes cheapens it, and undermines students’ chance to appreciate the experience of reading for the possibilities that it brings to their life. For students who read a lot, these programs are neither an incentive, nor a challenge. Yes, my classes participate in the schoolwide incentive programs when they are offered; after all, they would blaze past the requirements anyway. But I never let my students lose sight of what the true prize is; an appreciation of reading will add more to their life than a hundred days at Six Flags ever could.

  WHISPER

  End-of-Year Evaluations

  SCHOOL IS OUT FOR THE YEAR, and several altruistic students are spending their first day of vacation helping me move into my new classroom. Melinda, a former student who is now in high school, shows up to help, like she does every summer, and supervises the less-experienced volunteers. Carting boxes of books and dragging bookcases down the hall, I briefly contemplate whether I have too many books and then quickly discard this notion. Can you ever have too many books?

  Turning my attention to my desk, I sift through the neatly clipped and stacked piles of forms I still need to file. I grab one stack to take home and read—my students’ end-of-year surveys, in which they filled out a questionnaire that I designed to identify how students have grown as readers during the school year (see Figure 6.3). Reading through these surveys later, I consider my students’ personal feelings about reading, whether they met their reading goals, their favorite books and genres, and their heartfelt opinions about reading response letters, genre requirements, and in-class reading time. Data from these surveys shows amazing growth in the volume of reading my students did and a marked change in their attitudes toward reading in general.

  On their reading surveys from the first week of school, my fifty-four students reported reading 939 books in fifth grade, an average of 17 books per student; twenty-four students had read 5 or fewer books the entire year. During sixth grade, the same group read 3,332 books, an average of 62 books per student. The least number of books read by any student was 22. Students’ attitudes about how much reading they did ranged from disbelief to amazement to pride. Bongani was so proud of the number of books he read that he photocopied his reading log to show to relatives. With great drama Ben claimed, “I feel reborn!” and Mathew, who had read 0 books in fifth grade and 40 in sixth, remarked, “I read more than I thought I would in a lifetime!”

  FIGURE 6.3: One Student’s Feedback, Shown on Evaluation Form

  Source: Michelle, grade 6.

  Of the factors that students identified as contributing the most to their increased motivation and interest in reading, in-class reading time was selected as a significant factor by all fifty-four. Fifty chose our classroom library, and forty-six commented that having a teacher who reads helped them develop as readers themselves. I was surprised, in light of the fact that our class had no home reading requirement, that forty-two students indicated that they spent more time reading at home than they did before entering my class. This information reinforced my belief that students who read more at school are more likely to continue reading at home.

  I use students’ feedback as a tool to identify which components of our reading workshop need a tweak for next year. Book reviews, which I implemented halfway through the school year, were not as helpful as I had hoped they would be in sparking readers’ interest. I think if we had begun writing reviews earlier in the year, they would have worked better because students would rely on them more than they did when we only created a few. The same goes for the after-school book club, which did not get off the ground until February.

  Through this survey, students celebrate their reading accomplishments, express their opinions to me one more time about the structure of our class, and set future reading goals. By visualizing and stating plans for reading after my class, I hope that students will continue to move forward as readers. I tell them, “The most important books you will ever read are those you choose to read this summer. By continuing to read, you will prove that you are readers now without the requirement from me to do so.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Letting Go

  Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read.

  One does not love breathing.

  —Harper Lee

  I realize that I will probably never have the opportunity to read as much as I do now in class ever again.

  —Michelle

  TO PARAPHRASE Gary Schmidt’s The Wednesday Wars, one of my new favorites: teachers plant in the fall and harvest in the spring. Looking around my classroom this March day, I know it to be true. My students are bent over their books; one even reads it while blowing his nose and walking to the trash can. I end the year in the same way that I began it: sitting in my green chair, reading. Not reading in front of them as much as reading with them. I wonder, sometimes, whether I have pulled my students into a circle around me or whether they have opened their circle, and allowed me to come into it. Whichever it is, reading is what we are about now, and we are happy doing it.

  Instead of following me around, begging for book recommendations, my students have started to make preview stacks and suggest books to each other. They are mimicking what I have modeled. They don’t need me to support them as readers as much as they did in August, and this thought warms me and makes me sad at the same time. I know that they will be leaving me soon. For me, the worst part about being a teacher is saying good-bye to children whom I have loved, many of whom I will never see again. All I will have are the mental snapshots I take of them now, peeking over my book.

  Alex is a reading bonfire, and our library and the time to read have been kindling for him. He is so consumed by reading that he tunes everything out, including even me at times. I hope I am not the only teacher he will have who does not mind.

  If you have a book with a dog in it, give it to Melissa. Don’t give sad books to Parker; she claims to hate them, although she seems to read a lot of them.

  Molly loves suspenseful, fast-paced books and is very picky about what she reads. I have given her twenty books to preview at one time, and she has walked away without one. Selecting books she will like has become a personal challenge for me. I see a future in publishing for her.

  Kenan and Michelle are head to head at their opposing desks, dueling to see who will finish Inkheart first. It appears that Kenan left his copy at home today and is reading something else. The lead, for now, goes to Michelle.

  Bethany, Madison, and Dana are so enamored with Scott Westerfeld’s Midnighters series that they have convinced me to use tridecalogisms, the thirteen-letter words that have such power over the darklings in the books, for our next vocabulary list (see Figure 7.1). They bring me new words each day. Instead of our usual ten words, this particular list will have thirteen.

  Brandon, who had never been an expert in anything but getting into trouble before arriving in my class, is now the class expert in all things Gary Paulsen. When our new copies of The River and Brian’s Hunt arrived, he stood at my desk and waited for me to cover them with Con-Tact paper so he could take them home. I knew when I ordered them that Brandon would get them first.

  If Margaret Peterson Haddix has written a book Jordan hasn’t read, I haven’t found it. It is probably a good thing that the end of the year is close. I have almost run out of suggestions for her.

  Daniel is lugging so many books home in his backpack to read over spring break that I worry he will have back trouble. He asks me every day if I have finished Children of the Lamp: Day of the Djinn Warriors, so he can read it next.

  Josh and Riley, confident and popular, claim not to be readers, but both have quietly put more books into the hands of their classmates than almost anyone. They are proof that if you can get the cool kids to read, others will follow.

  FIGURE 7.1: Madison’s homemade locker tag shows her love for Midnighters.

  Bishop has so much enthusiasm for the books
he loves that you can’t help catching it. I credit him with making Drums, Girls, and Dangerous Pie the most widely read book in class this year, despite the fact that we own just one copy of it.

  We tease Bongani and Betenia about all of the book hostages they have. They are both so book-hungry that they collect mounds of books in their locker as if they were storing nuts for winter.

  And I have to wonder, is a reading winter coming for them soon? I recognize how tenuous their newfound love of reading is and how few teachers let students run wild as readers like I do.

  I know this because some of them come back and tell me.

  Back to Square One?

  Ally and her twin, Hanna, show up in my doorway shortly after school begins to return the books they borrowed from me over the summer. The twins are talkative and bubbly, as usual, and we spend a few minutes chatting about what they did during the break. Our conversation drifts to the books they are returning and the twins’ impressions of them, but the talk eventually turns to their current seventh-grade English class.

  Ally sighs, “I am heartbroken, Mrs. Miller. Our new teacher doesn’t believe in giving us free reading time.”

  “Really?” I am walking a line here. I want to acknowledge Ally’s feelings without maligning the teacher she will have for the entire year.

  “She has all of these books that we are required to read as a class, but we don’t get any time to read our own books.”