The Book Whisperer

by Donalyn Miller

  Yes, students benefit from the deep analysis of literature that a thorough look at one book provides, but there needs to be a balance between picking a book apart to examine its insides and experiencing the totality of what a book offers. There are other paths to teaching critical analysis and reading skills than belaboring one book for weeks. Let’s not lose sight of our greater goal: inspiring students to read over the long haul.

  Alternative: Rethinking the Whole-Class Novel

  My first suggestion on the topic of whole-class novels would be to evaluate whether you are truly required to read certain texts with your students or whether this is just a tradition. When your department has invested budget money and time in a closetful of whole-class novel sets, it is hard to break away from the entrenched attitude that reading the same book across the grade level is the best instruction for students.

  If your school district, language arts department, or school culture requires you to read certain texts with your students, look for ways to provide support to students who may not be able to read the book on their own, and limit the amount of time spent reading the book.

  Some ways to compromise:

  • Read the book aloud to students. Your ability to fluently read a text that is inaccessible or challenging to many students aids their comprehension, vocabulary development, and enjoyment. Students can apply their mental effort to building meaning from the book instead of decoding the language.

  • Share-read the book. Share-reading involves you reading aloud to students while they each follow along in their own copy. In addition to providing the benefits of read-alouds, share-reading may increase students’ reading speed because they have to keep up with a reader who reads at a faster rate than they do. In addition, students’ sight recognition of vocabulary improves because unknown words are pronounced for them. Again, students’ focus can be steered toward comprehension rather than decoding.

  • Take a critical look at arts and crafts activities and extension projects. Any activity that does not involve reading, writing, or discussion may be an extra that takes away from students’ development as readers, writers, and thinkers. In What Really Matters for Struggling Readers, Richard Allington reminds us, “When we plan to spend six weeks teaching Island of the Blue Dolphins, we plan to limit children’s reading and fill class time with other activities.”

  • Limit the number of literary elements and reading skills you explicitly teach with any one book (Fisher and Ivey, 2007). Do not try to use one text to teach students everything they need to know about symbolism, characterization, or figurative language. Focus instruction on the elements and skills that students need to comprehend that specific text. The same goes for explicitly teaching scores of vocabulary words. I would rather expose my students to fifteen different texts to meet my instructional goals than beat one book into the ground, expecting it to demonstrate a multitude of literary concepts.

  I cannot deny that there are merits to reading one book with an entire class of students: the text serves as an example for the skills and knowledge you are teaching; you create a common literacy experience to which you can make future connections; and reading a book together fosters community among your students and you. The balancing act involves looking for methods that honor these goals while removing the factors that make the whole-class novel a detrimental practice for students.

  Alternative: Teaching Readers, Not Books

  Our district allows teachers the freedom to choose the materials that we use to meet the instructional requirements of Texas’s standards and the district’s scope and sequence curriculum. Students must walk out of my class knowing how to read critically and write well, but how I choose to deliver that instruction is left to me. If, like me, you are only expected to teach standards, not specific books, consider these avenues:

  • Select one theme or concept that students are expected to understand, gather a wide range of texts on this topic, and form book groups. I use book groups in language arts or social studies because this format allows me to teach the desired concept or skill and offer students different texts to reach those goals. Naturally, using universal themes or literary elements as the anchor for instruction instead of one text acknowledges the wide range of reading levels and interests in a classroom. I have found that this is the simplest way for a reading teacher to differentiate reading instruction.

  The first step in implementing book groups is to decide which concept or theme you need to teach. Write a few guiding questions that you want students to be able to answer as evidence that they have grasped the targeted concept from reading their book. Next, select books that are linked conceptually or thematically. Students will form groups based on their choices from the books you have gathered.

  To help students preview books, I use the book pass, an activity designed by Janet Allen. Students begin by selecting a book to preview, recording the title and author in a book pass log. Students preview the book, look at the blurb, read the first page or so, and flip through the book to look at the visuals. After the preview, students record a few notes about the book in their log and assign the book a star rating to indicate their interest in reading it.

  When I call time, students pass the book they were previewing to the student next to them and continue the preview process with the next book. After most of the books have been passed, students write the top three books they would like to read on the back of their book pass log and turn them in to me. I look over their choices to determine the study groups. I consider the reading levels of the selected books, and with the knowledge I have of the books and the capabilities of each student, I decide which book is the best fit. I also look at management issues such as the dynamics of each group and the number of copies I have of each title.

  For example, while my class was studying World War II in social studies, I wanted my students to understand the range of perspectives on this conflict by reading a variety of books. Using the book pass, students selected books on World War II from our vast library and read them over eight days of reading workshop time in class. Each group set reading goals for its members through daily meetings, and if students needed to take their book home to keep up with their group, they did.

  All writing and discussion among book group members, as well as the whole class, circled back to our two focus questions: “How were the characters (or people, if the book was nonfiction) in your book involved in the war?” and “What were the short-term and long-term consequences for them?” This issue-based study provided my students with the opportunity to evaluate the points of view from books read by other students in addition to their own. We examined the perspectives of Japanese Americans, German soldiers, Holocaust victims, and children whose brothers and fathers fought in the war. I found that our classroom discussions about World War II were richer than if we had all read the same book because students came to the topic from different, often opposing viewpoints. My students walked away from the unit with a broader understanding of the war and its impact on all of the people touched by it.

  • Use short stories, excerpts, or poems to teach literary elements or reading skills, and ask students to apply their understanding to their independent books. Using an instructional sequence of modeling, shared practice, and independent practice, what I model and practice with students always ends with application of a skill or evaluation of a concept, using their self-selected books.

  When teaching the concept of literary conflict to my sixth graders, I cover the definitions of the types of conflict, drawing on examples from books and movies that are well known to them. Then, we read several short stories from our literature textbook, identify the conflicts in these stories, and analyze the resolutions in each. Students are then asked to go back to their independent novels, identify the story conflict (or conflicts), and evaluate how these conflicts were resolved. This process mirrors how teachers often use whole-class novels to teach literary concepts, with two marked differences: the modeling event took significantly
less time than reading an entire book would, and the end point of my instruction led to independent reading, not ferreting out the same answers from the same book. Students who can demonstrate skill in this way show me not only that they understand the concepts of literary conflict and resolution but also that they comprehend the story they read—no book report needed.

  I have learned that teaching a whole-class novel is not the best way to share literacy in a classroom because it disenfranchises students who cannot read the assigned book on their own or who have no interest in the book. Students passing books back and forth because they like them and find them to be meaningful, students begging you to read aloud to them, students arguing about the motives of the characters in their own books—all of these activities indicate that students are reading and getting everything out of reading that we wish for them to. My daily interactions with students tell me what I need to know.

  Every concept and skill I teach, even when it involves grammar, connects back to students’ independent work at some point, and I feel that this independent work must be self-selected reading and writing events, not the shorter goal of a worksheet or test practice. If not, how will I ever know to what extent they have grasped my instruction? It follows that this style of teaching fosters my students’ independence and frees me from designing assessments and activities for all of the readers in my classroom. I could never design assessments for sixty students that demonstrate what students know as well as their application of reading strategies and literary concepts to their own books does. If you cannot find a method for assessing students that uses authentic texts, I would ask why that concept is worth teaching.

  Traditional Practice: Comprehension Tests

  For countless students, successful scores on a comprehension test are the culminating goal of every book they have ever read in school. Instead of savoring the books they’ve read or celebrating what they’ve learned from them, the ability to pass these tests becomes students’ purpose for reading. Comprehension tests feed into a classroom cycle of assign it, then assess it. But where is the learning and teaching in that cycle? Teachers assign these summative assessments in order to motivate students to read and to determine whether students did, in fact, read a book. Where is the joy that we hope reading will engender in students?

  We cannot confuse assessment techniques with motivation techniques, either. Reading for the goal of performing is not motivating for students beyond their desire to earn a good grade on the test and may actually reduce their reading enjoyment and enthusiasm for reading outside of school. After all, how many adult readers would choose to read if they had to take a multiple-choice test for every book they finished? Imagine how the alarming amount of television that Americans watch would decline if completion of a test were required after each program!

  Retention of details about the characters or plot of a book may be part of the comprehension process, but regurgitating facts does not show that the reader has grasped the nuances of the themes in a book or gotten anything meaningful (or pleasurable) out of reading it. I have many former students who were involved in computer-based reading incentive and testing programs once they reached middle school. They tell me of their hatred for the programs and how they cheat (successfully, I might add) on the tests by sharing the answers with each other, without ever having read the book.

  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. Although proponents of these programs claim that students have reading freedom, the truth is that a student’s selection of a book is limited by its point value and whether a test exists for it. Hence, developing students struggle to collect enough points to meet the teacher’s requirements, and underground readers are bound to the books for which an Accelerated Reader test exists. These programs, which are reading-instruction wallpaper in many schools, send a message to young readers that a book’s value lies in how many points it is worth, and reduce comprehension to a series of low-level trivia bites gleaned from the book. How does this sort of program prepare students for reading in the world outside of school?

  Furthermore, shifting the purpose for reading a book toward the memorization of plot details and away from an overall appreciation for the book changes how students read. Instead of falling into a book and traveling on a journey with the characters, readers float on the surface of the story and cherry-pick moments they predict they will be tested on later.

  Short of reading mountains of books and writing tests yourself, how can you determine whether students have read a book and comprehended it? As I described earlier in this chapter, I ask students to show their understanding of the literary elements that I have taught them in class by delving into their own books. Students cannot do this effectively if they have not read and comprehended the book.

  A Word About Practice for Standardized Tests

  We live in a world of standardized testing. My students will eventually be expected to show the concepts and strategies that they have learned during my class on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills at the end of the year. I do not worry about this end goal much because I know that the amount of reading and response that my students do is the best preparation for this assessment. Frankly, the state’s goal is narrower than mine. The state assessment measures only a small number of the standards that the state prescribes that I teach. I want students to become life readers, people who read avidly.

  I know that students who read widely and can talk and think critically about the books they are reading have little trouble doing well on standardized reading assessments, and my students reinforce my beliefs by acing the state test every year. I am not just talking about the gifted readers, either; I am talking about students who had failed the test the year before and were at risk of failing it again. I have no issue with standardized testing per se; I believe that students who cannot pass the minimal expectations set by these tests are not good readers. What I have grown to mistrust is how the high-stakes nature of these tests has disrupted quality reading instruction.

  In many classrooms, I see a shift from deep reading instruction with a wide range of materials to endless drilling and rote memorization of test-taking tricks. This is not teaching reading, it is teaching test taking. Many of these tricks are not transferable to any reading situation other than test reading and, therefore, do not prepare students for most of the reading that they must do beyond the test.

  By sixth grade, most of my students have spent at least three years in classes in which test preparation and the drilling of test-taking strategies were the most common type of reading instruction they received. They have not read many books other than a few class novels. The opportunity for them to self-select reading material has been largely nonexistent. They have done almost no writing. 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. Endless test prep is the number one reason that students come to my class hating to read. They don’t think test prep is one kind of reading; they think it is reading.

  Test Reading as a Genre

  Instead of narrowing my instructional focus to test prep, I prefer to teach reading standardized tests as its own genre. Here’s how you read a map; here’s how you read a newspaper article; and here’s how you read a test. I spend a few weeks prior to the yearly standardized test on showing students how the tests are designed, discussing the different types of test questions, and examining the terms that are used in question stems. We talk about the skills and knowledge these tests are trying to assess and how to go about looking for the answers. I teach students how to read a test, but I do not teach reading through the test. Students should already have a foundation in all of the topics that will be as
sessed on a standardized test before they look at it. I don’t think students should encounter literary terms for the first time in the context of a test question. When we talk about testing, we talk about how the test is designed to ask them about what they already understand about reading and literary analysis.

  There are many ways to assess what students have learned, using measures that are tied to independent reading, although any assessment will have an air of artificiality to it; after all, life readers do not take assessments. The methods I suggest leave a smaller, less invasive footprint on the reader than the typical comprehension tests and book reports. The goals of all assessments should be to celebrate the accomplishments of readers, promote and plan for future reading, and foster the collaboration of a reading community.

  Traditional Practice: Book Reports

  In my opinion, the entire goal of a book report is for students to prove to the teacher that they actually read a book by demonstrating their ability to recite, in detail, all of the events or important facts from it. If a student is not a reader, how the book report motivates that student to pick up a book in the first place is never addressed. Some students do not read for many weeks and then power through a book in the days leading up to the due date for the report. They will hammer out a report, breathe a sigh of relief, and revert to a nonreading state until shortly before the next report is due. The report becomes an external motivator in which a grade creates pressure to read. In no way does that kind of motivation mirror the internal drive felt by life readers, for whom the pleasure of reading increases the desire to read. Reading lacks personal significance for students who see the report as the reason for reading—all stick and no carrot. Not only do the requirements for writing book reports fail to encourage students to develop consistent reading behaviors, but the reports are a chore to write and painful for the other students to listen to. After all, who wants to hear a complete summary of a book you may or may not have read? Book reports are also a bore to grade.