Skip to main content

Teacher Reads: THE BOOK WHISPERER




I picked this book up in hopes of solving the problems of the universe. Or  to at least get students to read more, so they can figure out for themselves how awesome it is.

In the book, Donalyn Miller describes how she implements reading instruction primarily through independent reading of student-selected novels. At the beginning of the year, she places a lot of focus on getting to know her students' interests and reading background. Then she utilizes both the school library and her own classroom library (which sounds like every teachers' dream) to match each student with several books that cater to those interests. Impressively, she challenges her students to read 40 books in one year. To help students meet this challenge, she carves out a lot of time during the school week to allow students to read. She also looks for ways to incorporate students' reading into standards based learning. She justifies her practices by sharing anecdotes from students and telling about her standardized test score successes.

I was torn as I read this book, and it made me realize that I might be a little cynical. Her descriptions of her classroom seemed a bit too saccharine...a little too Hollywood perfect. Her successes with even the most resistant, struggling reader seemed unreal. I commended her for the high expectations she set for her students, but I wasn't sold on 40 books. I have since read her blog post, "The 40 Book Challenge Revisited", and get that it is less about a number and more about creating a community of reading. 

I couldn't help but compare her idea's to Kelly Gallagher's Readicide. Like Gallagher, she rejects reading reward systems like Accelerated Reader, stating that they place too much emphasis on meaningless, petty rewards. According to her, once the rewards are gone, many students stop reading because they haven't discovered the inherent value of it.  She also rejects using reading logs and uses a reader's notebook to communicate with her students about what they are reading. I have never known anything other than AR and have seen the good and the bad that goes along with it. I'm still not sure where I stand on this.

Unlike Gallagher, Miller is staunchly against whole class novels. She claims they are a waste of time and are one of the main reasons that students turn away from reading in the first place. I stand by Gallagher's arguments for a shared reading experience and a universal literacy. Students need opportunities to be guided through a text like Hamlet, and there's value in challenging students to read it. I believe there has to be balance. Students should be allowed to select their recreational reading but should be challenged to tackle more complex texts in the classroom with scaffolding. 

As I read this book, I tried several small "experiments". I brought back silent reading during warm up time (something I did last year, but replaced with sentence of the week). I started having students do short book recommendations on a Google Presentation. I made deliberate efforts to talk about books I'm reading and books I like. The results of these changes were very apparent. Many students mentioned on their end of trimester reflection that they liked having time to read at the beginning of class. The book recommendations opened up a lot of conversations between kids about books they enjoyed. It's amazing how even the smallest changes to your daily practice can improve the learning environment.

I have work ahead of me to improve student reading opportunities. The plan now is to look for more ways to increase the time students get to read independently and incorporate more choice in whole class novel selection. This book also reinforced the idea that I have a professional and personal responsibility to read a lot more than I currently do. More importantly, I think teachers deserve time to read books for fun. How can I expect to create a culture of book lovers if I can't find that for myself on a regular basis?

So until next time, I'm going to lay off the teacher books and curl up with The Crossover by Kwame Alexander. Happy reading!
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Perception vs. Reality

Before I became a "real" teacher, my perception of teaching English was that I would be blowing kids' minds with classic literature and handing out grammar worksheets.  Needless to say, that hasn't happened...yet. Instead, I was surprised to find that I loved teaching about writing. In particular, I found a love of teaching argumentation and persuasion. The seventh graders are gearing up for argumentative writing. We begin by talking about the concepts of perception and reality and how those two things influence our views of the world and all its issues. I have them make a poster that's based off a popular meme to help ground those concepts. It hardly seems like work, and it's one of the few assignments we do where I get to hear things like, "Can I finish this at home?" or "Can I do another one?" The task is to make a perception and reality poster. I start by showing them an example for a teacher, like this one . This makes for a great
Post a Comment
Read more

First Week is in the Books!

In 7th grade English, we did some activities to help get students get acquainted with their new lives in junior high. On the first day, I challenged the students to work together.  We did this activity.  It was great to observe how each student approached the challenge and helped their team out.  My favorite part of class this week was talking about the Genius Hour project. I didn't have a much time to talk about it as I would have liked, but we were able to brainstorm a few ideas to think about over the weekend. Genius Hour brainstorming "Seventh Grade" activity Most of the students I have in Public Speaking had not previously had a class with me, so I think we got to know each other a little better this week.  We did a speaking and listening activity where one student had to describe a picture while the other student listened and tried to draw it. Students also worked in small groups to brainstorm all the different ways we communicate and wrote definitions of
1 comment
Read more

Tongue Twisters, Growth Mindset, and Self-Portraits

To celebrate the beginning of fall (or to mourn the end of summer), here is a lovely picture of a sunflower in my yard. Here’s what we were up to this week! The seventh graders continued their exploration on narratives this week.   We practiced summary writing and writing about theme.   We also talked about how setting can influence the events of a story.   We used close reading strategies using the Collections Close Reader .   To put all this practice together, my students have some interesting short stories of their own in the works.   I can’t wait to read them! I’m really kicking myself for not getting any pictures of the demonstration speeches we did in second hour this week.   I’ll leave it up to you to picture my students teaching the class how to make cheesecake, wash a dog, tie a bowtie, ride motorcycles, and make lava lamps.   It was a diverse set of topics to say the least. Friday, we relaxed a bit from the stress of speech delivering and had a Tongue Twister Battle.
Post a Comment
Read more