The Book Whisperer

       Earlier this summer I was at a workshop by Eric Jensen expanding my knowledge base from his books "Teaching Kids with Poverty in Mind."  It was while I was there that "The Book Whisperer" by Donalyn Miller was recommended to me.  The teacher was very enthusiastic about the title and I had already ordered the title for our Professional collection.  Needless to say I was excited when both it and "Reading in the Wild" arrived at school.  I took "Book Whisperer" home with me and read it.  It was a quick read and best of all it excited me about reading.  I'm a librarian, so I'm a reader at heart but it is always refreshing to read books that are written with passion and a desire to inspire others in education.
As I flew through the book I got frustrated that I couldn't highlight inside it because it was a library book.  Rarely do I read a book from a library, especially a professional book and think, I need to get my own copy of this.  That said, it encapsulated and gave voice to my own philosophy of inspiring a life-long love of reading.

I've been doing a lot of reading recently with being in grad school but I am sad to say that, like our students it was purely for information gathering purposes and not only did not inspire a love of reading. As a result I can certainly relate to students reading a number of texts that they simply don't love.  Thankfully I have been buoyed by a strong foundation that can overcome this less than enjoyable reading to remember that come reading can in fact be fun.

Oddly, this philosophy is somewhat contrasted with "Annual Growth for All Students" which shows how a school system's approach to address reading deficiencies in it's students before 3rd grade. The methods successfully implemented in by the staff in this book use pre-scripted lesson methods and materials like those found in the "Imagine It" series, a textbook source our school system uses.  It is a method that many teachers do not like because they feel that it stifles their individual strengths or their unique classroom makeup.

The reason that many students are behind in their reading skills is that they have not been exposed to or given the opportunity to read as much as others.  I would imagine that whether you choose to use the pre-scripted methods or the more personalized choose your own books (that are on your actual reading level, not your grade level), I imagine the key is what kind of data you collect and how you analyze it to determine deficiencies and skills that need addressing.  Certainly many books on a wide variety of levels can do this,it just becomes a bit more work to make it happen.  Admittedly, more work is nt something most of us want to hear.   Yet having said that, if we can create students who love to read, their internal motivation should help solve the problem of students struggling with reading skills while also creating a society of literate citizens, something we should all desire whether we teach, have children of our own, or merely live here.