The Book Whisperer

by Donalyn Miller

  The Slippery Slope of Book Talks

  Perhaps the tedium of book reports is why book talks have replaced book reports in many classrooms. The purpose of a book talk is not to prove to the teacher that you have read a book but to share with other readers a book you have read and persuade them to read it themselves. Recommending a book for the purpose of getting a friend to read it is more in alignment with what adult readers do when they finish a book.

  Recognizing the inherent flaws in asking my students to do book reports, I implemented book talks for a time. However, I was still not happy with the results. Students, having already written and presented years of book report summaries, gave away too much information. At the other extreme, when students were asked to share their favorite moment from the book, I often heard, “My favorite part of the book was at the end.”

  Book talks did encourage some students to read the books their peers recommended, but I had to set aside at least two days of instructional time so that we could get through all the talks. Again, this was time when my students were not reading and writing. Invariably, several students had the same book to share, and we all had to sit through repeats. I taught my students the term spoiler, encouraging them not to give away so much information that no one would want to read the book after they finished talking about it. I then began to question whether the book talks were any better than the reports. I came to the conclusion that they were not. This realization coincided with the discovery that I could not duplicate the classroom design of experts in every respect. I needed to respond to my own observations and instincts about what did and did not work in my classroom.

  Providing friends with enough information to interest them in reading a book and getting recommendations from other trusted readers are valid reasons for sharing opinions about books. When we distort this natural conversation among readers into one child standing at the front while all of the others sit up straight, stay quiet, and listen dutifully to hours of presentations, that free-flowing dialogue is lost. This is why I ditched both book reports and formal book talks and moved to book commercials and book reviews.

  Alternative: Book Commercials

  Book commercials are advertisements—short, impromptu testimonials from students about the books that they have read and enjoyed. (Think about how you might tell a friend about a book over lunch.) The intent of a book commercial is to provide students with a forum for sharing the books they love and for recommending those books to other readers in the class.

  Once a week or so, often on Fridays at the end of class time, I will ask students whether anyone has a book to recommend to the class. As a means of sharing the books I have read that students might like to borrow, I often present my own book commercials for them. We talk about what I do not reveal about the book in these conversations, as well as what I do say. We also read lots of blurbs and teasers from the backs of books and jacket flaps in order to model our own conversations after these published examples.

  Students can stand next to their desk or sit in my green director’s chair (a rare treat) and informally share with the class about their book. If anyone else has read the same book, I ask that student to add their opinions of it, too. Students record any books from the commercials that interest them on the “Books to Read” pages of their reader’s notebooks, and I do, too.

  I keep a class roster on a clipboard and check off the students who share, making sure that everyone provides at least one commercial over the course of the grading period and that no individuals dominate the weekly discussions. I give everyone a grade for their book commercial; we all get to hear about books other readers like; and the entire experience lasts no more than twenty minutes a week. The students are excited to share their books, and we can all talk back and forth about them instead of listening passively to book talks or reports. I do not need to question the comprehension of students who give recommendations because their enthusiasm and strongly held opinions show me that they have read the book and responded to it authentically. If they disliked a book, they can share that, too!

  Alternative: Book Reviews

  I adore book reviews, as evidenced by the hours I spend each month poring over Booklist magazine and studying recommendations from Amazon and Goodreads on the Web. Consider book reviews authentic forums for celebrating books and sharing information about titles in your classroom, too. My students write book reviews and post them on their classroom blog, or they print newspaper column-sized versions and glue them inside the book itself, right alongside the blurbs and reviews of the professionals. While I might choose a book because Publishers Weekly has starred it, my students are more likely to pick a book that Riley or Eric recommended!

  BOOK REVIEW CRITERIA

  • Quotes from the book

  • Quotes from famous writers and reviewers

  • Cliffhanger questions

  • Personal reactions and opinions

  • Awards the book and author have won

  • Recommended reading age

  • Other books by the same author

  • Comparisons with other books

  For the past week or so, my students have been reading professional book reviews and book jacket blurbs and teasers for the purpose of determining what information professionals include when evaluating books. We’ve made a chart of the criteria found in these reviews.

  Jacob remarks that every book review he read included the word “compelling,” so we add to our chart a list of words that reviewers include to entice the reader and make their book sound interesting: compelling, action-packed, thrilling, thrill ride, exciting, and riveting.

  With a list of criteria from which to begin, students spend the next week composing their own book reviews (see Figures 6.1 and 6.2 for examples). I am asked to provide quotes for endless reviews because students know that I have read many of their books. I am careful to avoid using compelling to describe any book, though!

  In order to inspire students to read when school requirements to do so are lifted, we must provide them with authentic opportunities to share with other readers what they love about the books they read. If our classroom practices only serve to assess whether or not students read—or to push our own instructional agenda—then we are doing little to encourage students to read. Traditional reading instruction that focuses on mandates outside of students and stirs fear-based motivation hijacks reading away from readers. Give it back to them.

  Traditional Practice: Reading Logs

  Many permutations of the reading log are used in classrooms, but all have common features. Students are asked to record how many minutes or pages they read over a given time period. Teachers require their students to read a certain number of minutes or pages per day, week, or grading period. Keeping these logs—whose purpose is for students to document their independent reading as proof to their teachers that they are reading—is an ineffective practice because recorded time spent reading is no proof that students actually read much. Students may write down how much or how long they read nightly but not finish many books. A conversation with my students during my first year of teaching revealed the futility of the home reading log. Simply put, the logs do not accomplish what they are supposed to accomplish. This lesson was one of the first my students taught me. It went something like this:

  FIGURE 6.1: Riley’s Review of Click Here

  Source: Riley, grade 6.

  FIGURE 6.2: Kenan’s Review of Inkspell

  Source: Kenan, grade 6.

  “OK, guys, it’s Friday—time to turn in your reading logs.” Groans and the rifling of twenty-five papers ensue.

  “Hey, Mrs. Miller, my dad forgot to sign my reading log.”

  “Well, I guess you will have to get him to sign it over the weekend and bring it back in on Monday.

  I continue, “Doesn’t your dad sign it every night? You are supposed to get it signed every night after you read.”

  “My dad says he doesn’t have time to do that. I just have him sign it on F
riday mornings when we are in the car.” A classroom full of heads nodding in agreement tells me that this is a common practice.

  “Are you telling me that your parents don’t know whether you are reading every night or not? They are not keeping track of how much reading you are doing at home?”

  “My mom believes me when I tell her I am reading. She just signs the log because you make us do it for a grade.”

  A chorus of “Yeah, me, too” circles the room.

  Julie pipes up: “Mrs. Miller, I hate that log. I always forget to write down what I read each night, so I just sit down and fill it out the day we have to turn it in. I am not going to keep that log in bed with me at night so that I can write down what I read.”

  “Just because we fill out the log doesn’t mean we actually did the reading,” Amanda says.

  When I questioned the rest of my students, it became clear that most of them were not keeping track of their daily reading in the log, and that most of their parents were not monitoring how much reading, if any, their children were doing at home. Lacking parent buy-in and perceived as a burden by students, the reading log begs to be fabricated. Deceitful, I suppose, but I imagine there are students in classrooms everywhere who fake their reading log at some point, even among those who read diligently. As a parent, I’ll admit to signing papers hastily shoved into my hand by my daughters when we are in a mad rush to get out the door in the mornings.

  Sadly, requiring parents to sign reading logs has failure written all over it. What I was really doing was assigning family homework, which is a hit-or-miss effort at best. As a new teacher, I assigned reading logs because it was what every other teacher did. How else would I monitor how much reading my students were doing?

  The log is a reward for students who have strong home support for reading, but a punishment for those who don’t. Thus, it never serves the students it’s supposed to. Furthermore, in the case of my students who read at home each night but thought the log was a pain to maintain, it was a sign that I did not trust that they were reading when they said they were. No one wins in this battle.

  So why assign logs in the first place? How did the reading log become such a ubiquitous practice? I see two reasons. Teachers require their students to keep reading logs because they think that parents will respond to the home reading requirement and monitor their children’s reading more closely. Other teachers believe that mandating that students maintain and submit a reading log will motivate them to read.

  Think long and hard about your students. I bet that the ones who are not keeping the log are those who you believe are not motivated readers, so this carrot-and-stick approach—require the accountability of the log, and they will read because of it—doesn’t work. As long as the motivation to read sits outside the child, it will never be internalized. Don’t be surprised if children who you know are capable, even avid readers, struggle with the log, too. These students prefer to spend their time reading, not accounting for their time. After a student spends an hour engrossed in a book, the log is a reminder that reading is a school job.

  Why, then, are reading logs so popular among teachers? Because in theory, they provide us with tangible evidence that our students are engaged in independent reading. Yet they don’t produce the outcome we are hoping for. The reality is that you can never mandate or monitor how much reading your students are doing at home. Yes, there will always be students and their parents who maintain the log because you require it, but there will also always be those for whom the log will serve only to discourage reading. Because it is an external motivation, the log never motivates students to read after the requirement is lifted. The bottom line: this log is about you, not your students. Logs don’t give an accurate accounting of how much students are reading, and maintaining them does not motivate them to read more, either.

  Alternative: Expanding Reading in Class

  I expect my students to read at home for at least twenty minutes per night, but I never check on this or quiz them on whether they are doing it. I cannot effectively monitor this in any reasonable way. If a student is not making progress on his or her reading requirements or seems to spend an inordinate amount of time reading one book, I hold a conference with that student and ask about how much time he or she spends reading at home, but that is all.

  As I discussed in Chapter Three, the only way to make sure that your students are reading every day is to set aside time for it in class. The only way you will know that your students read every day is to watch them read right in front of you. Daily reading is what transforms reading into a lifelong habit and builds reading ability—far preferable to bursts of reading as the sun sets on the night before a reading log is due. My students are more likely to continue reading a book at home when they have been reading it in school, too. I know this because they come to school excited about what they read the night before or groan that they stayed up too late reading again. Enthusiastic readers who eagerly tell me about what they read the night before are the only evidence I need that students are reading at home. The end-of-year evaluations I solicited from my students this year revealed that most of them were reading at home, even when I did not hold them accountable for it. Kenan declared, “I’ve read more books because of the time I get in class to read. I even read more at home because of it. I get to a really suspenseful part or toward the end [of the book] then I have to read it at home.” They read because they want to, not because I make them.

  Alternative: Freedom Within the Structure of a Reading Requirement

  Setting some sort of goal for students’ independent reading is a valid practice if the goal requires them to finish reading books. I have had students who would read and write every day in my class or record nightly reading in a log forever, and never actually complete a book or a piece of writing. Students are accomplished readers when they are able to express their feelings about the books they have read, not point to the number of hours they have spent doing time with a book. How does this work with a student who is struggling to meet his reading requirements? The following conversation with Jon illustrates how to encourage a student who is still not on board.

  “I have only read six books this year,” Jon complains, so that everyone in the room hears. “We are halfway through the year. I am never going to read forty books.”

  I could walk over to Jon and give him the reading pep talk, but I know there are others in class who could benefit from what I have to say, so I call back, “Jon, how many books did you read last year?”

  “Hmm, two or three?”

  Knowing that Jon is a sports fanatic, I ask, “Jon, if an athlete improved his performance 200 percent over one season, what would his coach say?”

  “I guess he would think that was pretty good.”

  “Jon, have you read some books that you liked this year?”

  “Yeah, a few.”

  I know that Jon has recommended Soldier’s Heart and Love That Dog to some of his friends in class, so I can tell that he values at least some of what he is reading.

  “Remember when I told the class that the average adult American read only four books last year? You are reading more than most adults do. Celebrate that, and don’t worry so much about requirements. Just keep reading!”

  Jon is reading, although not as much as either one of us thinks he should. His participation in our reading community, by recommending the books that he is reading to other readers, reflects growing engagement. The fact that Jon was previously able to get through an entire school year and read only two or three books and that this was acceptable is not a fact I dwell on. What I do honor, however, is his increase in reading. By the end of the year, Jon had, in fact, read twenty-five books and, at least some of the time, had found reading worthwhile.

  Traditional Practice: Round-Robin and Popcorn Reading

  Round-robin reading is the entrenched practice of calling on students randomly to read aloud. Some teachers use a modern variation of round-robin reading—popcorn reading—in
an attempt to add a level of fun to the drudgery of reading aloud. During popcorn reading, the teacher calls on a student, who reads for a determined period of time or text length, and then the first reader calls on another student to pick up where they left off, jumping readers around the room like popcorn in a popper. Read-aloud activities like round-robin and popcorn reading are popular among teachers when the entire class reads the same book, short story, or textbook passage.

  By randomly calling on students to read, these methods are meant to ensure that all students are following along, that they are paying attention to what is being read, and that everyone reads aloud occasionally, but I don’t think these purposes serve the needs of students. The added factor that students hate round-robin reading makes it an act I question. Ask your adult friends what they remember about reading aloud in this manner, and I’ll bet that many recall round-robin reading with the same level of anxiety as that associated with going to the board to solve math problems in front of the class. Under the guise of a fun activity for students, reading aloud on demand is just torture—not only for those who are reading but also for those who are listening.