The Book Whisperer (7 page)

This is what I want for my students, to lose and find themselves in books. During their own busy days of soccer practices, Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, homework, and chores, they have little free time to read, so I must make sure that I give them time to read in class every day. After all, if I do not make time for them to read in school, why should they make time for it in their life?

How much time are we talking about? My class starts every day with independent reading time. At the beginning of the school year, this time may be as little as fifteen minutes. I want students to get used to the routine of starting our class this way. At the beginning of the year, before I start my conferences with them on a regular basis, I read, too. Students need a reading role model in front of them. I also want to make it clear to them that reading time is not an opportunity to talk to me about their homework or ask to go to the band hall. Nor is it free time to take care of personal errands or clean out a binder. Reading time is for reading. I value this experience so much that I set aside time for it every day, no matter what else we are doing. I joke to my students that if we had a twenty-minute class, it would be spent reading.

I express to my students that reading is not an add-on to the class. It is the cornerstone. The books we are reading and what we notice and wonder about our books feeds all of the instruction and learning in the class. At first, this reading time is my mandate for them. They read because I tell them to. I want to instill in them the daily habit. Like brushing their teeth, reading is a responsibility that my students understand I expect them to assume. Yet time spent reading feeds more reading. The more my students read, and grow into a community of readers, the more they want to read. As we move into the year full swing, I set aside a little more time each day for independent reading. By springtime, students spend about thirty minutes of our ninety-minute language arts block reading their independent books. My students do not even realize how much time they are reading each day. But I do know how much they value the time I give them to read because of all the groans and complaints I get when I announce that reading time is over. I often hear, “Mrs. Miller, can we have a day where we just read for the whole class?” In the spring, when half of my class was away at a band competition, we did just that!

No matter how long students spend engaged in direct reading instruction, without time to apply what they learn in the context of real reading events, students will never build capacity as readers. Without spending increasingly longer periods of time reading, they won't build endurance as readers, either. Students need time to read and time to be readers.

In
The Power of Reading
, his meta-analysis of research investigating independent reading over the past forty years, Stephen Krashen reveals that no single literacy activity has a more positive effect on students' comprehension, vocabulary knowledge, spelling, writing ability, and overall academic achievement than free voluntary reading. By loading the instructional day with traditional drill-and-kill activities such as weekly spelling and vocabulary lists and tests, grammar workbook exercises, and low-level comprehension assignments, all of which have a minimal or, in many cases, negative impact on student achievement, Krashen asserts that we are denying students access to the one activity that has been proven over and over again to increase their language acquisition and competence as communicators: again, free, voluntary reading. I have observed that my students are more likely to read a book at home that they have started reading at school. Free reading also liberates underground readers so they do not have to switch back and forth between their book for school and their own book.

The question can no longer be “How can we make time for independent reading?” The question must be “How can we not?” Since making independent reading the core of the reading program in my classroom, I have witnessed an increase in student achievement as well as a sharp increase in student motivation and engagement. Students like Kelsey who have failed the state assessments pass them after a year of heavy reading. Students who previously had never read more than the few books they were required to read for class read book after book. What are the effects of intensive reading? Better writing, richer vocabularies, and increased background knowledge in social studies and science are natural outgrowths of all of the reading my students do.

Even if traditional instruction were able to provide equivalent gains, the improvement in students' attitude toward reading would be cause enough to devote substantial time to independent reading. My former students come back and tell me that time to read their own books in class is almost nonexistent in middle school and high school. Why aren't we giving students more time for independent reading in class? I hear many teachers say that they cannot set aside time for students to read because they have so much content to cover, but to what end? Because reading has more impact on students' achievement than any other activity in school, setting aside time for reading must be the first activity we teachers write on our lesson plans, not the last. It is said that we make time for what we value, and if we value reading, we must make time for it.

—Horace Mann

 

Dedicating a large part of the instructional block for independent reading may seem impossible in our current standards-based world of high-stakes testing, but it is not. Even if you must follow a district- or school-mandated program that includes scripted drill activities and a lockstep curriculum, you can make time for independent reading. Thanks to a savvy principal, I have support for designing my entire class around independent reading, but I know that others may not have this freedom. There are creative ways, however, to carve out extra reading time for your students, even if you have a very structured routine, just by maximizing the moments of a typical class day.

I teach two double blocks of language arts and social studies per day, about two hours and thirty minutes of instructional time per class. Recently, I tracked the interruptions of my classroom instructional time over the course of a week. I logged fourteen visits from office personnel to deliver messages, forgotten lunches, and notes that needed to go home; nine phone calls from other staff members; two hallway discussions of student behavior; and one impromptu parent conference. All told, my students and I lost forty minutes of instructional time that week, and this is at a school that makes an effort to limit interruptions during the class day. This list is not atypical for most teachers—no doubt, you recognize each of these distractions. And each time these interruptions occur, we have to stop teaching and then regain our footing in order to pick up where we left off. The greater issue of limiting classroom interruptions is a systemic one, but how to recoup lost time with students is within a teacher's reach.

In the first few years of my teaching, nothing filled me with dread the way that a ringing classroom telephone or knock on the door did. Not only did I lose my train of thought, but it was hard to pick up the thread of my students' engagement when we had to stop and start again. I also struggled to keep one eye on my visitor and one eye on students who might take advantage of the situation and misbehave. Maintaining control of a classroom when I am distracted by interruptions requires that my expectations for students' behavior be clear so that my students know what to do. During the early weeks of school, my students practice getting out their books when there are classroom interruptions. I start by prompting students to read when we are interrupted, but as the year progresses, students internalize this procedure, first as a habit, but eventually as a desire to steal more reading time. Their books call to them all of the time now, too, you see.

When evaluating an instructional practice, I first ask myself, “What purpose does this activity serve?” No matter how flashy, fun, or pervasive in classrooms an activity is, my overarching goal is to increase students' reading ability. Any pursuit that does not accomplish this specific goal goes out the window.

Like a lot of teachers, I used to prepare assignments such as editing exercises or writing prompts and have them on the overhead projector for my students to complete as they entered the classroom. On the surface, these activities were designed to engage students in some sort of literacy instruction or practice, but we all know what a bell ringer or warm-up is truly meant to do: get students in their seats, quiet and working, as soon as possible. Evaluating these activities with a critical eye, I realized that every nonreading activity was wasting precious minutes of reading time daily.

Take a look at a common classroom warm-up lesson: students are asked to look for grammatical and punctuation errors in a scripted sentence. Correcting the sentence may take five minutes. Discussing their corrections with students and providing feedback might take another ten minutes. Considering how little of this direct grammar instruction actually transfers to students' writing (Alsup & Bush, 2003; Thomas & Tchudi, 1999; and Weaver, 1996), these fifteen minutes would be better spent reading, an activity that has been shown to improve students' writing and grammar (Elley, 1991, cited in Krashen, 2004).

With instructional time at a premium in every classroom, we cannot afford to waste any of it. Research has confirmed that independent reading is the better use of our time. Students in my class enter my classroom each day, get out their books, and start reading. Not only are students quiet and working (the implicit goal of all warm-up activities), but they are engaged in a productive endeavor that improves their reading performance. The amount of time I save by not having to plan and grade ineffective warm-up drills is icing on the cake.

My intention is not to disparage the activities that you may use as class openers; some of them may have instructional value, but I challenge you to find anything that has more impact on reading achievement than independent reading.

We teachers have more than enough anecdotal evidence that the students who read the most are the best spellers, writers, and thinkers. No exercise gives more instructional bang for the buck than reading. The added bonus for us teachers? I have found that independent reading is also among the easiest instructional practices to plan, model, and implement.

My sixth-grade students are quirky, with one foot in childhood and one in adolescence. They still like teachers and are not too cool to show it. A flock of students are always eager to help me sort papers, run errands, or erase the board when they finish their class work for the day. Before I filled every stolen moment with invasive reading, students would ask me whether they could draw or do homework for other classes when they were done with their assignments and there were always a few students who disrupted others when they had finished their work. Their talking and classroom wanderings distracted the students who were still working and me while I was trying to assist others. Since I redesigned my class so that students use every free minute for independent reading, these disruptions have ceased. What should students do when they finish all of their assignments for the day? Student learning—reading, writing, and thinking—should continue from the first bell until the last. While we teachers decry the lack of time we have to teach, it seems that we misappropriate a great deal of what we do have on classroom chores and mindless work.

A popular practice in many classrooms is the creation and use of folders filled with extension activities and extra practice sheets—exercises designed to occupy students who finish class assignments quickly. I made them, too, in those early years, back when I was stuck in the mode of doing what everyone else around me did. Like warm-ups, these fun folders for the fast finishers had little instructional value other than drill and practice and took hours of time to plan and create. When my students asked me whether they could read their books instead of doing the folder assignments, I got the message.

When I took a closer look at those folders, it became clear to me that they were simply time wasters, busywork, and, in some ways, punishment for students who were capable. Students hate those supposedly fun folders. My husband, a self-proclaimed slacker in school, figured out that when he finished his assignments earlier than other students, his reward was more work. He began to work more and more slowly, stretching out assignments that he could easily have finished in order to avoid the extra work. I surely reject any activity that fosters underachievement in students! I got rid of the folders. And my students started reading. Invasive reading helps students meet their reading goals for the class, engages them in an enjoyable practice that contributes to their academic achievement, frees me to work with students that may need my help, and minimizes off-task behavior problems. I can tell when my students are done with their assignments by listening, not because my classroom becomes rowdy and loud but because it becomes quiet when every student is reading.