The Book Whisperer: Awakening the Inner Reader in Every Child

by Donalyn Miller

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...