The Book Whisperer (20 page)

Bishop has so much enthusiasm for the books he loves that you can't help catching it. I credit him with making
Drums, Girls, and Dangerous Pie
the most widely read book in class this year, despite the fact that we own just one copy of it.

We tease Bongani and Betenia about all of the book hostages they have. They are both so book-hungry that they collect mounds of books in their locker as if they were storing nuts for winter.

And I have to wonder, is a reading winter coming for them soon? I recognize how tenuous their newfound love of reading is and how few teachers let students run wild as readers like I do.

I know this because some of them come back and tell me.

Ally and her twin, Hanna, show up in my doorway shortly after school begins to return the books they borrowed from me over the summer. The twins are talkative and bubbly, as usual, and we spend a few minutes chatting about what they did during the break. Our conversation drifts to the books they are returning and the twins' impressions of them, but the talk eventually turns to their current seventh-grade English class.

Ally sighs, “I am heartbroken, Mrs. Miller. Our new teacher doesn't believe in giving us free reading time.”

“Really?” I am walking a line here. I want to acknowledge Ally's feelings without maligning the teacher she will have for the entire year.

“She has all of these books that we are required to read as a class, but we don't get any time to read our own books.”

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.

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.

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.

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?