Elizabeth Graham's August Blog Post 1: Section One: Not This

In Section One of her book, No More Independent Reading Without Support, Debbie Miller holds up for examination many time-honored classroom traditions that while, enjoyable and instructive, tend to take up valuable time that could be spent on independent reading. As a former preschool teacher, I devoted time each day to the calendar, the weather and other routines. While these are important things for young children to learn, at some point they should be left behind. I especially chuckled at the image of Miller witnessing Paddy the Bear being dressed for the day's weather in Kindergarten, then in First grade, and so on. Quit guarding that bench, and give Paddy (and any other time wasting sacred cows) a rest!

Miller points out time wasters not to ridicule teachers or schools, but rather to help educators make time for what is really important: independent reading. As a lifelong reader, mother and school librarian, I tell students and their parents that the students that read the most will do the best in school.  And the best way to become a better reader is by reading more. No gimmicks, no tricks: just read.  Miller states, "When children read extensively, they learn about themselves, other people, and the world; they learn that reading is something they can do that empower them to control their lives, connect with each other, and make the world a better place." What better goal can we have for our students? Not just learn to read and read to learn, but read to live.

Side note: One of my reading heroes, Donalyn Miller, gives Debbie Miller the thumbs up on her blog, listing No More Independent Reading Without Support as a text that has "shaped my understanding of independent reading and informed my teaching."

Sharon Doyle's August Blog Post #1: Time?

     I am often amused that I sometimes use the excuse that "I don't have time to exercise", however, I seem to always find the time to eat.  Miller's article gave me the inevitable reminder that we always have time for what we genuinely believe we should be doing.  We read consistently that the improvement of reading for our students will not occur unless the students spend time reading with supported instruction about their work as strategic readers.  Perhaps the question needs to be re-framed to the statement of "There must be enough time."

     I have read research previously that the average time students in elementary schools spend actually reading is approximately 4 minutes per day.  Think about it - students listen to teachers read, other students read, complete work sheets, watch video clips, and stare at texts for hours during the day, but to actually read for themselves, question their thinking, and examine themselves as readers, little time is clocked.  I noticed today in my second grade music class that obvious ideas like you have to be looking at the book to read the words of a song was a concept that escaped more than 50% of the class.  Miller is correct, silent reading without conferencing or accountability systems that examine exactly what students are doing is not productive.  I witnessed first hand the artful or in most cases not so artful example of fake reading and these are second graders who should be excited about learning to read interesting materials that once were out of their reach. I am reminded that they must be reminded what good readers do for themselves that is not so instinctive to those who are struggling or in this case just learning to be readers.

    Students, to become meaning makers, must engage in independent reading - 'real' reading using books where they share both interest and ability to read. Realizing that teachers in all areas of the school can provide support for reading in a variety of ways is helpful, but is no substitute for strategic support by those same teachers for students' own mechanics of  independent reading.  As I think about the upcoming kid-watching observation, I also want to consider the amount of time I see students in actual reading - are they practicing reading with support or are they doing activities about reading or worse yet, are they mastering the fake reading Miller aptly described?

     Miller reminded me of the constant need to examine with one question - WHY?  Why do we engage in the learning activities we use each day?  Tradition or genuine need based on our best intuition, beliefs, and knowledge of our students? Is there enough time?  If we want to make a genuine difference for our students as readers - there has to be.


   

Mindy Connolly's August Blog Post 1: Always Time to Read

As I read the section of Debbie Miller's book, Finding the Time, I find myself reflecting on the ways we have attempted to encourage reading with our students. I am reminded of DIRT, Daily Independent Reading Time, that was put in place for 30 minutes a day, everyday. Teachers were encouraged to read silently so the students would see them reading. As Miller states, "they're modeling what a good reader looks like". No matter how hard we tried, many of us spent the DIRT period tying up loose ends, completing paperwork, grading papers - just trying to stay afloat. And while modeling to an extent is good, we weren't helping students find meaning in the text, we weren't helping them improve their reading skills. To many of us, reading is a hobby. We enjoy it. Give us a good book and a comfy couch and we are all to happy to indulge ourselves. To many of these students, reading was a chore. Oftentimes, they sat, staring out the window, they drew, they finished their homework. As long as they were quiet and it appeared they were reading, everything was good. But it wasn't. This in itself was wasted instructional time.
Last November, I went to New York City for personal reasons. While there, I visited a friend who teaches in a KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) school in Harlem. The teachers rotated as well as the students. There was one class every teacher taught. Unfortunately, I don't recall the name of the class. In this class there were two sets of students and two teachers. The school was small and so sometimes a room was shared. But while in this class, the students were all reading a book together. The students read in class and they read at home. While reading, the students were required to mark parts of their books with a sticky note. Sometimes the sticky note would be a question about something they did not understand, or it would be an Ah-Ha! moment. There were sticky notes throughout all of the students' books. I asked one student what they meant. Each note had writing on it, and she explained it in full to me. She did a much better job explaining the notes than I am in this blog. These students, they lived in the projects, they were poor and underprivileged. And they were reading. They were taking meaning from the text. Their literacy skills were improving! I was beyond impressed. No one was teaching from a text book or handing out worksheets. Their work was meaningful, it had purpose and I was excited!
After reading this chapter, I am excited about teaching reading! I am looking forward to what we are going to learn and how we are going to make reading meaningful for our students. If we can improve their reading ability, I believe they will show an increase in performance in their other subjects. It's a win win situation and we MUST find the time!

Julie Brown's August Blog Post 1: Making Time for What's Important

     I continued to go back to a sports analogy as I read Chapter 1 from Miller's book.  We are all familiar with the concept of practice makes perfect.  When children first begin to play a sport, coaches don't just send them out on a field/court and say, "Go play ball."  No, they spend countless hours teaching the fundamentals of the game and how to play different positions.  Of course, they do practice a lot, but not without the individualized instruction that goes along with the position.
     We as teachers can't just have kids practice reading.  They need to be instructed in the strategies of reading.  This is continuous.  Even professional teams have coaches because there are still things to learn and better ways to attack certain situations.  Therefore, to think that after the first few fundamental years of reading instruction that our job as teachers of reading is over and students just need to practice is misguided.  I, for one, was guilty of this for many years as a middle school language arts teacher.  Then I realized, just making students read isn't making them read better.  I had to look at my job differently.  Just as we have all come to realize; we are all reading teachers.
      Miller also brings up the concept of time.  I know schedules are busy and hectic and trying to fit another thing into the day seems impossible.  However, I believe Miller is right.  We have to prioritize things and find time in the day when we are doing things that may be redundant, unnecessary, or routine.  When looking at what a child needs to succeed in this school and beyond, I think we all would agree that reading is foremost on that list.  So much else cannot be accomplished without the ability to read.
       If we all jump in together and see this as a team effort, we may realize we have more time than we thought. 

Blair Wright's August Blog Post 1: Never Enough Time, But Maybe There Should Be...

In section 1 of Debbie Miller’s Is there Enough Time?, she really laid out how most teachers these days feel. We have reading, writing, math, science, social studies, spelling, handwriting, lunch, recess, restroom breaks, movement breaks…you name it, and we have to squeeze it into our day and even into our year. We are given not only standards to get taught, but also added obstacles along the way that need to be implemented or need our attention.   How will we squeeze another 30 minutes of independent time into our schedules? The answer is by making the time. 

Many teachers do the same thing in their classroom each and every year, such as the case of the Baltimore teachers dressing Paddy for the weather every day. We find a routine; we feel it is comfortable; it works, so we keep doing it each day and each year.  There isn’t anything wrong with a routine, or even dressing Paddy to teach weather, but is it the best use of time?  Could this time be used in other ways, such a reading? Miller made this exact point as she observed teachers in their classrooms.  In the article, she was making the point of what is really important in our day, which should be reading. Reading should be a hands-on, interactive process with students where we sit down with them and ask questions, find out what they are reading, and help them find themselves as readers. If you think of it that way, maybe 30 minutes isn’t too much time to help students become better readers.  

Kelli Wolfe's August Blog Post 1: Let's Push Up Our Sleeves

No More Independent Reading Without Support Section 1 peels the orange precisely. If our goal as teachers is for students to grow up and be "real" readers, then shouldn't they have tons of time practicing just that? Debbie Miller explains that for students to become readers, they need to spend huge amounts of time... reading.  However, we cannot forget that the second part of her sentence . . . “but not without instructional support.”  

Sadly, many teachers view independent reading as an extra...a time filler.  There are so many standards and expectations that need to be met each day.  As teachers, we very often feel we don’t have enough time to get it all done.  I love how Miller encourages us to look at our daily schedules and determine how much time is wasted . . . or could be better spent.  I read Worksheets Don’t Grow Dendrites several years ago, and Miller’s book reminded me of many of the principles Marcia Tate wrote about in her book.  We need to push up our sleeves and really evaluate every minute of our day.  Do we waste time?  Could time be better spent?  

Finally, Miller points out how important it is to know our students as readers so that we can coach them and challenge them in their journey.  One-on-one conferencing during Independent Reading will open our eyes and our minds to what’s going on inside the heads of our learners.  I am looking forward to future chapters . . . where I think Miller will give us more direction instruction on how to do just that!  J

Dawn Mitchell's August Blog Post 1: Finding Time for Independent Reading

Dawn Mitchell's August Blog Post 1: Finding Time for Independent Reading

In Section I of Debbie Miller’s No More Independent Reading Without Support she writes that children learn to read by reading but not without support.  I love this challenge she gives us at the beginning of her book and I definitely think it is relevant to us at the beginning of this school year. 

Miller writes, “What if there were a way out? What if there were a way – at least for part of the day – where things slowed down, your students had their hands and minds on great books, and you had the pleasure of conferring with them about their reading and themselves as readers?  No rotations, activities, or worksheets – just you, your kids, and books. If you could find a way out, would you take it?”

Miller explains that independent reading isn’t just Sustained Silent Reading where everyone stops, drops, and reads, the teacher included.  She explained that truly effective independent reading provides an instructional component, an application component, and a formative assessment component so that students have support during independent reading time.  Miller advocates for a reading workshop model.  She knows that to do this well, there has to be a consistent block of time during the school day.

This time is an investment into the workshop structure.  It is an investment into independent reading and more than that, it is an investment into each one of our students.

For the last fourteen years of my teaching career I have worked to implement workshop structure for both writing and reading where students have a supportive context for their application of real world literacy skills.  I know first-hand how we, as teachers struggle against the clock for time to make this meaningful work happen.  This was the first roadblock I had when implementing reading/writing workshop into my own fourth grade class over a decade ago and it is still the first instructional roadblock I always hear from the wonderful teachers I work with.  We don’t have enough time.  I agree.  There never is enough time. 

Time is the great equalizer.  We all have the same amount, each and every day.  Since we cannot make any more time, I agree with Miller that it is worth our time to carefully examine our schedule and look closely for the time that is hiding.  There is time, chunks of it hiding in the minutes of morning work we do to keep kids on task while we take attendance.  I have found a little time here and a little time there in transitions that take too long or routines that may not be necessary to extend all morning.  Debbie also asked to take a long look at our existing reading block and to see if we were really using our time to engage students.  Do they really need the packets of worksheets, the isolated times for all of the activities in the basal reader…? 

I know from my own experience when I moved from a scripted program to an authentic workshop structure where I used time for independent reading and writing, for formative assessments to help me know who my students were as readers and writers, and what skills and strategies they were and were not using to make meaning I could design mini lessons to specifically target what they needed to work on.  This wasn’t always easy, but it was fulfilling and everyone in the classroom grew, including me.  I used every resource I had to create lessons and it was constantly changing because my students were. 

I love how Debbie explains the difference between SSR and reading workshop on page 7.  She says, “When students sit quietly at their desk with a book or magazine during DEAR or Sustained Silent Reading (SSR) time, we might see them flip a page every minute or so, but we can’t see what’s happening inside their heads.  We don’t have evidence of how they’re making meaning of the text, the specific ways they’ve grown as readers, or what they’re struggling with as they read.  Without that information, we can’t teach them how to get better and we can’t be sure that – even if they read every day – all students are becoming better readers this week than they were the one before.”

With knowing already before school begins that we have only 180 days to do the best we can with the time we have, it is vital that we utilize the most effective methods possible.  I want to know that my students are growing.  I want to see evidence of them applying what they are learning in their independent reading.  I want to give this year all I’ve got.  I want to give them independent reading with support.

Sincerely,

Dawn