The Book Whisperer

by Donalyn Miller

  Hanna chimes in: “Yeah, we are all reading The Westing Game, and it is so boring.”

  I would never have recommended Raskin’s mystery The Westing Game to Ally in a million years. It is not her type of book. She is a fantasy gal through and through. The fact that the book is several years below her reading level is a mark against it, as well. I can see that we are back where we started: teacher-required reading and novel units without any thought to students’ interests or reading level. It is insulting that Ally’s reading experiences go unacknowledged by her new teacher. Her reading level and vocabulary development won’t progress much if she is reading books that are too easy for her.

  “We have to keep our books in a plastic Ziploc bag because she doesn’t think we can take care of them. She told us that she knows we probably don’t read enough, and that she wants to make sure we read more. Doesn’t she know where we came from? We all read tons last year, and she treats us like we don’t read.”

  Dismayed, I blurt out, “Did you tell her? Did you tell her that you read like crazy last year?”

  “No, it wouldn’t make any difference to her.” I don’t know whether this is true, but what is clear is that Ally and Hanna are underground readers whose feelings about reading and prolific reading experience have no place in their English class. Both girls developed a love of reading in my class, and I hate to think that they will have to pursue this love outside of school in order to maintain it. We are back to square one. Instilling lifelong reading habits in my students is like trying to hold the ocean back with a broom, a futile endeavor, if they are going to go right back to the same controlling environment they had before my class.

  Ally and Hanna leave that day with new books to read, of course. But they will have to read those books at home. I am thrilled that the girls came back to see me, but crestfallen because they are not going to get any reading time in school this year—other than for their assigned books—and because there is nothing, absolutely nothing I can do about it. I wish I could talk to their teacher, but there is no way that I could question another teacher about what she does in her classroom.

  I do the only thing I can do: get in my car and cry the entire drive home. I ask myself, would my students be better off if they had never had me as a teacher? (Dramatic wallowing, I know, but I was worked up.) Those plastic bags are a symbol that reading is an act students cannot take responsibility for without monitoring from a teacher. Why do we work so hard to build fences between our students and books? I may be setting them on the road to life reading, but I am not preparing them for years of traditional, teacher-controlled reading instruction after my class. What’s worse, my former students know what they are missing and they are heartbroken about it. They know that reading can be different, and that classrooms can be a place where readers get to choose, where time to read their own books happens every day, and the teacher turns the keys over to students. After talking to the twins, it seems to me that the only way they can survive as enthusiastic readers after my class is to take their reading habits underground.

  What Are We Preparing Students for?

  I have been told many times, both to my face and through comments on my blog, that I am not preparing my students for the “real world” by letting them read whatever they want. Yes, it’s true, if the real world means years of comprehension worksheets and test practice. If those things constitute reading instruction, then I suppose the naysayers are right, I am not preparing them.

  Why should I subject students to negative experiences now in order to prepare them for negative experiences later? I just don’t think mindless work is what I should be grooming them for. I grow weary of hearing teachers say, “We have to get them ready for seventh grade, or high school, or college.” They are in sixth grade! What about having an enriching, powerful, glorious year in sixth grade? The purpose of school should not be to prepare students for more school. We should be seeking to have fully engaged students now.

  If that argument is not enough for you, then consider the evidence from free-reading classrooms like mine. Allowing students to choose their own books and control most of their own decisions about their reading, writing, and thinking does a better job of preparing them for literate lives than the traditional—and ubiquitous—novel units, test practices, and pointless projects. What are we waiting for?

  Richard Allington’s findings from thirty years ago indicated that students weren’t spending enough time actually reading during reading instruction, and they still aren’t. The title alone of Allington’s landmark article “If They Don’t Read Much, How They Ever Gonna Get Good?” tells me everything I need to know. That article was published in 1977, the year before I entered middle school. I certainly didn’t see more reading in my middle school classroom as a result of this research, and I don’t see it in many classrooms now. No matter what intervention strategies you employ to support developing readers or what enrichment projects you provide to your most gifted ones, none of it is going to affect the reading achievement of all of the students in your classroom the way hours and hours of time spent reading will.

  Scores of research findings, federal policy documents, and books from gurus tell teachers that actual reading is the most valuable classroom activity. Although I read a lot of research, you don’t have to look any further than the catalogues and magazines the average teacher receives in the mail. Thumbing through the International Reading Association’s Professional Development catalogue, I count seven books whose explicit focus is to promote independent reading and students’ choices in reading material. If I add the books that advocate giving students some choice—for example, through literature circles—or the books that recommend independent reading as part of a comprehensive teaching model, I count fifteen more. The March 2008 issue of Book Links, a publication from the American Library Association, includes an article on motivating readers with the subheading “Sparking Student Interest” and an editorial from a teacher calling for a national initiative to connect students with books instead of focusing on testing.

  Despite the abundant information available on implementing free-choice reading programs and the clear research support for such practices, why is so little authentic reading done in schools? When students do get to read a book, why is the book still weighed down with so much “stuff,” as Allington calls it, instead of reading? I think it is acculturation. Teachers do what everyone else is doing. How can you plan and collaborate with other teachers if you see reading differently than they do? How are you going to get materials if your department head will not order them for you? How do you justify thirty minutes a day of independent reading for your students if your principal does not understand the value of such a practice?

  Even if teachers feel that letting their students read is more effective than any other practice in developing their capacity as strong readers, there is little institutional support for independent reading—that is, true independent reading without skill-based programs, comprehension tests, test practices, or incentives tied to it. There is a powerful pull from colleagues and administrators to keep doing it the old way.

  I still panic when other language arts teachers administer a complete practice test for the Texas state reading assessment to their students in order to build their “endurance” for the actual test in two months, wondering whether I should be doing it, too. The week of the practice test, a colleague told me, “My students can’t sit through six hours of testing and focus to the end. I tell them that I wouldn’t ask them to run a marathon without running a few miles first.” I think that it shouldn’t take a capable reader six hours to complete a reading test and that the best method for building up reading miles is to read books, but my opinion sticks in my throat and stays there.

  Fighting the Culture

  It is hard to fight the culture even when what you see in your classroom every day tells you that you are getting it right. And I am getting it right, I know it. My students’ test scores are as high as or higher than
those of every class in the schools where I have taught. This is not data to brag about unless the state’s minimum standards for students’ performance are your only goal. Admittedly, I breathe a sigh of relief each year when my students’ test scores come back, just like everyone else.

  Why do I still feel this way, even though I have years of classroom data to prove that reading freedom has a powerful impact on reading achievement and mountains of research to back them up? It is the culture of teacher-centered instruction and standardized testing hysteria. The culture makes me question myself, and I know that it is the reason why many teachers resist altering their practice. After all, these teacher-centered methods of teaching reading appear to be effective except for the small detail that children learn to hate reading. There is a fear of diverging from what is working because doing something new with students might not work, and who can take that chance when our reputations as teachers and, possibly, our jobs are on the line?

  But this culture is exactly why we have to take that chance and give reading back to students in every manner that we can. The institutional focus on testing and canned programs drains every ounce of joy from reading that students have or will have in the future. We have turned reading into a list of “have to’s,” losing sight of the reality that students and adults are more motivated by “want to’s.” The have to’s of reading—the test practice, the skill instruction, the literary analysis—are part of what we must teach students; I am not arguing that point. Students need to know how to take a reading test, break down a piece of literature, and read a textbook. I teach those concepts, just like you, but all of the skill-based reading instruction in the world will not stick with students if they are never expected or allowed to practice reading with books. And that kind of instruction is a guarantee that most of them will never read, not in the summer, not at home, and never again when their formal schooling ends.

  Learning from Exemplars

  Before I became a teacher, I was a bookkeeper. I worked in hotel and restaurant management for a decade. While I attest that a lot of what I needed to know about teaching reading I learned through my habit of lifelong reading, I picked up a tip or two from my corporate experiences. When corporate leaders desire to improve the efficiency, productivity, or earnings of their companies, they look at what the exemplars in their industry are doing and plan out methods for copying the procedures and attitudes that make those exemplars successful.

  The trend in education today is toward data-based decision making, a practice that was also borrowed from the corporate world. States compare their data: test scores, graduation rates, college-readiness statistics, and so on. School districts compare their data with those of other districts, and schools compare their data with those of other schools. Despite the increased use of concrete data to drive instructional decisions and the efforts of scores of researchers to define the best methods for increasing reading achievement, many teachers teach reading the same way that their predecessors did thirty years ago.

  These data comparisons help education administrators plan how to spend resources or hire and train teachers, but they don’t help teachers determine what they should do every morning when students show up for class. 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. What do the best readers know about reading that the developing ones don’t? What can we learn from our best readers to inform decision making about our poorest ones?

  Hands down, the students who read the most are the best at every part of school—reading, writing, researching, content-specific knowledge, all of it (Krashen, 2004). They are the best test takers, too. Teachers know this. Successful, strong readers are the ones teachers don’t worry about, the ones who could pass the state test on the first day of class, and need their books to educate themselves while sitting in our classes all year, learning nothing new from us. Instead of leaving these students to simmer on the back burner while we struggle to educate our poor readers, why not teach all of our students to adopt the attitudes and behaviors of the best readers?

  Lifelong Readers Are the Goal

  We make it hard on ourselves, that’s certain. It’s hard to give up the control. After all, if we are not micromanaging every aspect of reading for students, can we call what we are doing teaching? To give up control, you have to change your mind-set about what teaching is, what it can be for you, not just your students. I am still learning how to let go. One realization I have come to is that there is a marked difference between managing a classroom and controlling it. I can manage my classroom without dictating all thought and decision making for my students. My students’ self-concept as readers must extend beyond the classroom, even my classroom, or they have gained nothing lasting from me. If teachers control reading, we never give ownership of it to students. Students will not walk out of our classrooms with internal motivation to read if they see reading as an act that takes place only in school under the control of their teachers. Reading ultimately belongs to readers, not schools, and not schoolteachers.

  There are too many adults who equate reading with school; some take pride in not having read a book since graduation. This is not just the case for poor readers. This is true of most readers, even those who passed our classes and state assessments year after year. No teacher I know thinks this sorry state is acceptable, yet we fail to take responsibility for it, blaming parents for not encouraging their children to read, and the students themselves for not wanting to.

  I want more for my students than this nonreading state. I want them to feel that reading is a pursuit in which they continue to learn and receive solace and joy throughout their life. I want what English Journal editor and columnist Chris Crowe wants for his own children when he begs, “I’d like just once, to have one of them stagger into the kitchen, bleary-eyed and late for breakfast, because of staying up all night to finish a novel. I’d love to see them curled up on the couch rereading a favorite book. I would go to my grave a contented old man if once before I die, and before my kids grow up, I could hear one of my children talking excitedly to a friend about a book just finished.” This entreaty was not an admonishment directed toward his children or a missive from an expert; this was a dad pleading with his children’s teachers to encourage his kids to read.

  Connecting Through Books

  My journey with students takes me back to myself and what I have always known about reading. Being a reader is how I choose to spend my life, every aspect of it, inside and outside of the classroom. I often wonder whether my identity as a reader, someone who reads voraciously and always has a book recommendation, is all I have to offer. That may be true, but it is an oversimplification. How can I express the extent to which reading has shaped who I am as a human being?

  Although I see myself as kind, I am not a demonstrative person. If I have ever brought you a book unasked for, know that I cared. I said everything to you that I wanted to with that book. I have enough wisdom to acknowledge that an author’s words are more eloquent than my own. When we meet and I discover that we have read and loved the same books, we are instant friends. We know a great deal about each other already if we both read. I imagine this is why I strive so hard to get people around me to read. If you don’t read, I don’t know how to communicate with you. I know this is a shortcoming. Perhaps my mother, who worried that reading would make me socially stunted, was half right. I can never express who I really am in my own words as powerfully as my books can.

  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.”

  The time students spend in my class is fleeting, over too soon or, perhaps, just in time, but the hours we have spent together reading will outlast a school year. Books are immortality for writers, and as the conduit through which books have flowed into the hands of so many children, I feel that books are my immortality, too. If my students remember my class as the year they devoured scores of books, then that has to be enough for me. I cannot control what happens after they leave my class, but I do wonder, is it enough for them? Considering how many of my former students still e-mail me for book recommendations or show up in my doorway years later to talk about books, I would say it’s not.

  And They Do Return

  It is Friday afternoon, the book club my students begged me to start has just ended, and I am cleaning up my room. I look up from the desk I am clearing off to see Matthew standing in the doorway. Beaming, he announces, “The smell, I love the smell of this room. I can’t describe it; it’s like new books and cleaner. How are you, Mrs. Miller?”

  I give him a little hug, noticing that he has grown since last spring when he left my class. We spend the next half hour catching up on the books we have read since last summer. He asks, “Did you read Gregor and the Code of Claw?” (Spoiler alert: If you haven’t read it yet, you might want to skip the next six sentences!)

  “Yes I did. The ending suggests that the series might not be over. I still think there is something about that neighbor that Suzanne Collins did not tell us.”

  “Yeah, I know what you mean. I can’t believe she killed off Ares. He was one of the best characters! Did you know that The Battle of the Labyrinth is coming out soon?”