The Book Whisperer (16 page)

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:

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.

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.

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.

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 assessed 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.