The Book Whisperer: Awakening the Inner Reader in Every Child

by Donalyn Miller

The only groups served by current trends to produce endless programs for teaching reading are the publishing and testing companies who make billions of dollars from their programs and tests.

fifty-one studies that prove that students in free-reading programs perform better than or equal to students in any other type of reading program.

A trail of worksheets from a teacher to their students does not build a connection with readers; only books do.

I transformed my classroom into a workshop, a place where apprentices hone a craft under the tutelage of a master.

Students clamored for recommendations, asking me whether I had read the treasured books many were now clutching in their hands.

At the time, Jace was not an enthusiastic reader, but he got caught up in the wave of excitement from his classmates and me.

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.

The more books I recommended that she liked, the more Hope trusted me to suggest books.

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.

if we value reading, we must make time for it.

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.

A classroom atmosphere that promotes reading does not come from the furniture and its placement as much as it comes from the teacher’s expectation that students will

read.

I know this approach works because I have never had a student who reached the forty-book mark stop there.

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.

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.

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.

Teachers tie so many strings to reading that students never develop a pleasurable relationship to reading inside or, regrettably, beyond the classroom.

these practices are what educational policy leader Richard Elmore calls “unexamined wallpaper”—classroom practices and institutional policies that are so entrenched in school culture or a teacher’s paradigm that their ability to affect student learning is never probed.

Teaching whole-class novels does not create a society of literate people.

In the Phi Delta Kappan article “Farewell to A Farewell to Arms: Deemphasizing the Whole-Class Novel,” Douglas Fisher and Gay Ivey question the widespread use of whole-class novels in reading classes, claiming, “Students are not reading more or better as a result of the whole-class novel. Instead, students are reading less and are less motivated, less engaged, and less likely to read in the future.”

We cannot confuse assessment techniques with motivation techniques, either.

Programs like Accelerated Reader or Scholastic Reading performance counts, in which books are assigned a point value and students must complete a multiple-choice test after reading them, are the worst distortion of reading I can think of.

Any activity that substantially replaces extensive reading, writing, and discourse in the classroom needs to be better than the activity that it replaces, and nothing, not even test prep, is better for students’ reading ability than just plain reading, day after day.

all stick and no carrot.

Simply put, the logs do not accomplish what they are supposed to accomplish.

The log is a reward for students who have strong home support for reading, but a punishment for those who don’t.

As long as the motivation to read sits outside the child, it will never be internalized.

High-ability students resent being used as tutors,

I have never observed a student who developed a long-term reading habit because of an incentive program.

Rewarding reading with prizes cheapens it,

The purpose of school should not be to prepare students for more school. We should be seeking to have fully engaged students now.

The institutional focus on testing and canned programs drains every ounce of joy from reading that students have or will have in the future.

Instead of looking for answers to our instructional questions outside of our classrooms, I believe that we should be looking inside of our classrooms and learning from our own students.

Our exemplars for performance exist in our classrooms.

Reading ultimately belongs to readers, not schools, and not schoolteachers.

This is how I show my students that I love them—by putting books in their hands, by noticing what they are about, and finding books that tell them, “I know. I know. I know how it is. I know who you are, and even though we may never speak of it, read this book, and know that I understand you.” We speak in this language of books passing back and forth, books that say, “You are a dreamer; read this.” “You are hurting inside; read this.” “You need a good laugh; read this.”