The Book Whisperer: Awakening the Inner Reader in Every Child

by Donalyn Miller

KEY COMPONENTS OF A READING WORKSHOP • Time: Students need substantial time to read and look through books. • Choice: Students need the opportunity to choose reading material for themselves. • Response: Students should respond in natural ways to the books they are reading through conferences, written entries, classroom discussions, and projects. • Community: Students are part of a classroom reading community in which all members can make meaningful contributions to the learning of the group. • Structure: The workshop rests on a structure of routines and procedures that supports students and teachers.

Reading is both a cognitive and an emotional journey.

I realized that every lesson, conference, response, and assignment I taught must lead students away from me and toward their autonomy as literate people.

I implemented the reader’s notebook, taken straight from Fountas and Pinnell’s model, in order to manage my students’ independent reading; set up reading requirements for my students based on genre as a path to choice; and assigned book talks to replace the dreaded book report. I photocopied mountains of reading strategy worksheets, lists of reading response prompts, and workshop management forms. I bought every picture book that my workshop mentors recommended.

You see, while I searched for the key to being a master reading teacher, I forgot what workshop teaching was all about—my role as master reader—which goes beyond just following a lockstep sequence of lessons that some distant guru had advised me to use.

Reading changes your life. Reading unlocks worlds unknown or forgotten, taking travelers around the world and through time. Reading helps you escape the confines of school and pursue your own education. Through characters—the saints and sinners, real or imagined—reading shows you how to be a better human being.

To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life. —W. Somerset Maugham

If I were to acknowledge that these excuses have merit, I would allow them to become reasons for my students not to read.

Embracing their inner reader starts with students selecting their own books to read.

Why does choice matter? Providing students with the opportunity to choose their own books to read empowers and encourages them. It strengthens their self-confidence, rewards their interests, and promotes a positive attitude toward reading by valuing the reader and giving him or her a level of control. Readers without power to make their own choices are unmotivated.

developing readers, dormant readers, and underground readers.

The type of students whom I call developing readers are commonly referred to as struggling readers.

For any number of reasons, including inadequate reading experiences or learning disabilities, these students are not reading at grade level. They have difficulty understanding the reading material in every aspect of their lives. By the intermediate grades, the majority of developing readers have been in reading intervention programs and tutoring for several years. Their standardized test scores are low, and some have failed at least one state assessment. These students do not see themselves as capable of becoming strong readers, and they (and their parents) are beginning to despair, perhaps thinking that reading competence will remain forever out of their reach.

Why do developing readers continue to struggle in spite of every intervention effort? Well, the key might be in the amount of reading these students actually do.

No matter how much instruction students receive in how to decode vocabulary, improve comprehension, or increase fluency, if they seldom apply what they have learned in the context of real reading experiences, they will fail to improve as much as they could.

Here is why I have hope for children who have fallen behind and why I call them developing readers instead of struggling ones: these students have the ability to become strong readers. They may lag behind their peers on the reading-development continuum, but they are still on the same path. What they need is support for where they are in their development and the chance to feel success as readers instead of experiencing reading failure. They also need to read and read. Time and time again, I have seen a heavy dose of independent reading, paired with explicit instruction in reading strategies, transform nonreaders into readers.

I knew she would be able to read these easily and have a positive experience with the books. As Kelsey developed experience as a reader, her confidence grew and she read book after book. As Kelsey continued reading, the difficulty and sophistication of the books she chose increased naturally and she became a stronger reader.

Because of the demands of standardized testing in the world of No Child Left Behind and the drive to make sure all students reach a minimum level of reading achievement, developing readers take up a disproportionate amount of the resources in a school. While teachers focus their instructional efforts on the students who are at risk of failing state assessments or classes, there is a whole group of readers who are taken for granted.

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.

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.

After all, Mark Twain reminds us, “The man who does not read great books is no better than the man who can’t.”

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.

mind-traveling

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.

I would look for ways to use the books he does read to meet my instructional goals, like I do now.

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.

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...

• 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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

The more my students read, and grow into a community of readers, the more they want to read.

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.

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 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!!!).

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.

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

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

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

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).

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.

When Students Are Done

Since I redesigned my class so that students use every free minute for independent reading, these disruptions have ceased. What should students do when they finish all of their assignments for the day? Student learning—reading, writing, and thinking—should continue from the first bell until the last. While we teachers decry the lack of time we have to teach, it seems that we misappropriate a great deal of what we do have on classroom chores and mindless work.