The Book Whisperer

  USEFUL BOOKS AND WEBSITES

  • Association for Library Services to Children: Literary Awards (www.ala.org/ala/alsc/awardsscholarships/literaryawds/literaryrelated.cfm). This Web site is home to the Newbery, Caldecott, Printz, Coretta Scott King, and other book awards given by the American Library Association each year. The site includes extensive summaries and the complete list of the current and former award winners and honor medalists. The Newbery list alone is a gold mine of the best American literature of the past century for children.

  • Books That Don’t Bore ’ Em: Young Adult Books That Speak to This Generation (Blasingame, 2007). With lists of books on topics like “Living Against the Grain” and “Misfits and Outcasts,” Blasingame provides an overview of popular books that tap into the social issues and personal interests of young adults. More than just lists, this text includes in-depth interviews with popular authors such as Avi and Nancy Farmer, as well as tips on how to pick high-quality, high-interest books for your students and you.

  • Goodreads (www.goodreads.com). Goodreads is a free social networking site for readers. Members create bookshelves of books they have read, are reading, or plan to read, and share lists with their invited friends. This endless repository of book reviews, contests, and lists feeds the most avid bibliophiles. I share books and lists with former students and teachers across the country and often browse the lists and bookshelves of my friends for new books.

  • en Robinson’s Book Page (http://jkrbooks.typepad.com/). Jen, who has a Ph.D. in industrial engineering and co-founded her own software company, is the life reader we all hope to raise. Her prolific blog and Web postings are filled with detailed reviews and personal reflections about the world of children’s books, their authors, and children’s book publishing. She reads more than I do, and her taste in books is spot on. I follow her blog closely just to find out what she is reading!

  • teenreads.com (www.teenreads.com/). This Web site is not meant for teachers; it is meant for students. The futuristic layout and features like “Videos/Podcasts,” “Cool & New,” and the monthly poll skillfully integrate the latest networking tools to create a fun, modern site about reading for today’s teen readers. Check out the up-to-date “Ultimate Teen Reading” list for over 250 books that were voted perfect reading choices by readers of the site. I use the “New in Paperback” and “Coming Soon” links to stay ahead of my students on the latest books.

  • Create your own reader’s notebook: At the start of each year, when my students are trimming and gluing their own reader’s notebooks, I make a new one for myself. I record all of the books I have read or abandoned for an entire year in one notebook, just like I ask my students to do. Each notebook serves as a record of what I have read over the years, and I use my reading lists to order books for the class library or make recommendations to my students and friends. Reflect on what you are reading: I am not suggesting that you write summaries of every book you read or your personal responses to them, but you can, if you would like to. Think about what you are reading, and observe what you like about the book or what you don’t like about it. What makes it challenging or fun to read? What sticks with you about the book when you are done?

  Share Your Struggles

  In addition to the tips I mentioned in the preceding section, I find it important to share my reading challenges with my students. When I read The Time Traveler’s Wife with my book club, I talked with my students about how challenging the book was for me to read. I enjoyed it tremendously, but the shifts between narrators and the setting changes made it hard for me to follow. I revealed how I had to slow down my reading pace and focus on the details more than I would have with a chronological narrative. They were surprised to learn that I, too, experience difficulties when reading.

  Share with your students what you enjoy about the books you read, what makes them hard for you, and what strategies you use to get through challenging reading material. Students feel inadequate when they have to struggle. Knowing about your reading challenges can help boost their self-esteem. I have seen teachers “fake model” the experience of having reading obstacles with their students while guiding them through test practices. Students know that a teacher does not struggle through a fifth-grade-level reading passage, and faking it only serves to lessen their trust. It’s better to be honest.

  Standing off to the side and telling students to read doesn’t work for most of them. How are they supposed to become readers if they don’t have any models to emulate? Remember that you are the best reader in the room, the master reader. Embrace that, and wear your reading love proudly in front of your students every day. The reality is that you cannot inspire others to do what you are not inspired to do yourself.

  CHAPTER 6

  Cutting the Teacher Strings

  Reading is not a duty, and has consequently no

  business to be made disagreeable.

  —Augustine Birrell

  I think my worst nightmare was last year, when we all had to read the same book, and do worksheets, and make journals after every chapter.

  —Christina

  IN THE FALL OF 2007, the National Institutes of Health awarded $30 million to four research centers—the University of Colorado at Boulder, Florida State University, the University of Houston, and Baltimore’s Kennedy Krieger Institute—in an Houston, and Baltimore’s Kennedy Krieger Institute—in an attempt to uncover why reading interest declines and ability dips as students approach adolescence (Samuels, 2007). While I cannot fully explain this demotivation or why it happens to so many children, I can tell you who to ask about it: the children themselves.

  Over the course of my teaching career, students have told me consistently that reading as it is traditionally taught and assessed actually encourages them to hate reading. My student Skylar told me during a conference, “What makes reading painful is when it takes longer to do reading worksheets about a book than to actually read a book.” And Dana shared her previous experiences in fifth grade: “Every day we would read a chapter of a book and spend the rest of the day either discussing [it] or doing worksheets. When book reports came around, I read the book in two days and finished the book report by the end of the week. We still had to work on it two weeks later, and I had nothing to do.”

  Reading has become schoolwork, not an activity in which students willingly engage outside of school. Teachers tie so many strings to reading that students never develop a pleasurable relationship to reading inside or, regrettably, beyond the classroom. Referring to the endless activities piled onto reading books in school, my student Jordan writes, “I want to scream, this doesn’t help us!”

  Seeing the Wallpaper

  My principal often asks us, his teaching staff, to examine traditional practices and question whether 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. Are the activities and assessments we use accomplishing our intended instructional goals, or are they simply what we have always done?

  As I mentioned in Chapter Three, whenever I encounter a practice that is widespread in reading classes, I consider what the goal of the practice is and then look at ways to reposition the practice so that it is more motivating to my students and more in line with my personal beliefs about reading and the habits and skills shown by life readers, not just school readers.

  Let’s unpack some of the tried-and-true (they have definitely been tried, but are they really true?) language arts standbys and examine their intended learning goals. In addition, let’s consider alternatives that accomplish the same goals but are more in keeping with the habits of true readers and what matters most to students.

  Traditional Practice: Whole-Class Novels

  We shouldn’t teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.

  —B. F. Skinner

  Teach
ers build elaborate units of instruction around novels, breaking down a text into discrete concepts for closer study. If you are a new teacher, you might feel that your best hope for survival is that some wiser teacher will share these Rosetta Stones that decipher how you are supposed to teach reading, complete with all of the activities you need to “get students through” books. If you do not have a mentor teacher to feed you lesson plans, you need look no further than your local teacher supply store, where a wall of prepackaged novel units awaits you.

  Some schools and school districts create lists of required novels for each grade level. These lists are revered as sacred law despite the fact that you cannot find a single national standard that requires students to read specific texts.

  Teaching whole-class novels does not create a society of literate people. Take a poll of your friends and relatives (those who did not become teachers), and ask them how they feel about the books they read in high school. Now, ask them how much they still read. 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.”

  If reading a book together as a class doesn’t improve students’ reading ability or enjoyment of reading, what is the purpose of this practice? Some teachers assert that it is critical to expose students to great literature (think John Steinbeck, Mark Twain, Nathaniel Hawthorne) as part of their cultural heritage. How else can we motivate teenagers to read these authors on their own?

  I don’t disagree with this goal, in theory; after all, I had to smile when my teenage daughter, after reading The Crucible, referred to Salem in a joke. But is the ability to generate a pithy literary reference all she got from reading Arthur Miller’s play? Reading historically and culturally significant literature enhances readers’ background knowledge, to be sure, but at what cost? My teenager only reads the books she prefers in the summer because she is burdened with required reading during the school year. Consuming a literary diet built exclusively on the classics does not provide students with the opportunity to investigate their own personal tastes in reading material and narrows their perspective of reading to the school task of hyper-analyzing literature. There needs to be a balance between the need to teach students about literature and the need to facilitate their growth as life readers. What about the greater goal of encouraging students to read when the time for dissecting classics ends?

  One Size Does Not Fit All

  Indoctrination into the classic literary canon supersedes all other aims for the readers in our classrooms, it seems. Teachers can always point to a few students who love these classics, but I argue that they are a minority or that few become future readers as a result. Why would they? Every student that moves through our classes is not destined to become an English literature major, and we cannot gear our teaching as if they were. Using whole-class novel units as the primary method of delivering reading instruction has inherent problems. Witnessing these problems in my own class and others, and listening to the complaints my students have shared about whole-class novel units has led me to these truths:• No one piece of text can meet the needs of all readers. A typical heterogeneous classroom may have a range of readers that spans four or more grade levels. It is impossible to find a book that is at an appropriate instructional level for all of these students. The only way to differentiate among such a diverse group of readers is through a more liberal selection of reading material.

  • Reading a whole-class novel takes too long. A month or more of instruction around one text takes a lot of time that students could spend reading more books on a wider range of topics. The slowest reader in my sixth-grade classes needs only a week or so to complete a book at their reading level. You do the math.

  • Laboring over a novel reduces comprehension. Breaking books into chapter-sized bites makes it harder for students to fall into a story. Few readers outside of school engage in such a piecemeal manner of reading.

  • Not enough time is spent reading. Many novel units are stuffed with what Lucy Calkins calls “literature-based arts and crafts,” extensions and fun activities that are meant to engage students but suck up time in which students could be reading or writing.

  • Whole-class novels ignore students’ interest in what they like to read. Reading becomes an exercise in what the teacher expects you to get out of the book they chose for you, a surefire way to kill internal motivation to read.

  • Whole-class novels devalue prior reading experience. What about the students who have already read the book? Admittedly, this may be a small number of readers, but I have sixth graders who have already read To Kill a Mockingbird and The Outsiders—two books that I know are taught in upper grades. Are they going to be expected to read them again? Advanced readers deserve the opportunity to continue their growth as readers, too.

  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.