Classroom Caffeine
Classroom Caffeine
A Conversation with Donalyn Miller
Donalyn Miller talks to us about access to reading and books, reader identity and reader communities, and joy in reading and learning. Donalyn is known for her work sharing the importance of self-selected independent reading and provides suggestions and resources that foster children’s love of reading and the development of positive reading identities. She is known as The Book Whisperer, the title of her first book, published in 2009. Donalyn has also written Reading in the Wild, and co-authored Game Changer! Book Access for All Kids and The Commonsense Guide to Your Classroom Library with Colby Sharp, and The Joy of Reading with Teri Lesesne. With Colby Sharp, Donalyn co-founded The Nerdy Book Club blog, which provides daily inspiration, book recommendations, resources, and advice about raising and teaching young readers. Donalyn Miller is an award-winning Texas teacher, author and reading advocate. She lives in San Antonio.
To cite this episode: Persohn, L. (Host). (2024, Oct. 8). A conversation with Donalyn Miller (Season 5, No. 3) [Audio podcast episode]. In Classroom Caffeine Podcast series. https://www.classroomcaffeine.com/guests. DOI: 10.5240/517B-1356-013D-C672-F136-M
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Education research has a problem the work of brilliant education researchers often doesn't reach the practice of brilliant teachers. Classroom Caffeine is here to help. In each episode, I talk with a top education researcher or an expert educator about what they have learned from years of research and experiences.
Speaker 2:In this episode, donalyn Miller talks to us about access to reading and books, reader identity and reader communities, and joy in reading and learning. Donalyn is known for her work sharing the importance of self-selected, independent reading and she provides suggestions and resources that foster children's love of reading and the development of positive reading identities. She is known as the Book Whisperer, the title of her first book published in 2009. Donalyn has also written Reading in the Wild and co-authored Game Changer, book Access for All Kids and the Common Sense Guide to your Classroom Library with Colby Sharp, as well as the Joy of Reading with Terry Lesane. With Colby Sharp, donalyn co-founded the Nerdy Book Club blog, which provides daily inspiration, book recommendations, resources and advice about raising and teaching young readers. Donalyn Miller is an award-winning teacher, author and professional development leader who has taught 4th, 5th and 6th grade language arts and social studies in the Fort Worth, texas area. For more information about our guest, stay tuned to the end of this episode.
Speaker 1:So pour a cup of your favorite drink and join me. Your host, lindsay Persaud, for Classroom Caffeine Research to Energize your Teaching Practice. Donalyn, thank you for joining me. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 3:Thank you for inviting me. This is a fun Monday kickoff.
Speaker 1:For me too, for sure. So, from your own experiences in education, will you share with us one or two moments that inform your thinking now?
Speaker 3:I've written about some of these. Probably one that might be well known to readers of the Book Whisperer is the epiphany that I had. I guess it was the first day of school and I will always refer to it as the book frenzy. But I had a modest, at the time, classroom library of several hundred books on some old bookcases in my room and was introducing my class and myself to my new sixth graders that year and a boy asked me when will we be allowed to check out books? And there was something about that word allowed that just crawled all over me. I just it upset me. I was upset in my heart that his expectation was that that was some kind of I don't know privilege or contraband or something that he was probably going to have to negotiate a way to get to, or that it would be a period of time before a language arts classroom would even offer up the books in the room to the children. I think that was part of it too. Classroom would even offer up the books in the room to the children. I think that was part of it too.
Speaker 3:And, like many schools, you're familiar with this as a librarian. You know the school library isn't necessarily open the first couple of weeks of school. So if my students do not have access to the school library yet and I don't have the classroom library in a place where they could use books, what are they reading and what message are we sending to the kids? Now, that cascade of understandings didn't happen in the moment, but I did think about it. But my knee-jerk reaction was, of course, now we're getting books. Now, that's what I said to them, and then I just turned them loose. You know, is there anything more beautiful than middle schoolers turned loose with joy and over books? No less.
Speaker 1:Right, absolutely.
Speaker 3:So ever since, for every single school year after that, we checked out books the very first day, there was no discussion of aloud and also really some intentionality around communicating to the children that those books belong to them as much as they belong to me, that it was our classroom collection and they took more tender care of those books as a result. Almost every single lesson that I have learned that has dramatically altered my teaching has come from my students, I believe. But one understanding that I don't think I really came to until I left being a regular classroom teacher and went out in the world was the role that access plays so deeply in the literacy development of children. I mean, I understood it, but you don't really understand all the ways that systemically, that access can influence outcomes for kids. You know public library access, the access in the home, book ownership, just the ability to own a book. I don't think I really understood the depth of that challenge for children in our country until I started going out and visiting more libraries, more schools, more communities than my own.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I can totally understand that and I think that book access is such a it's a critical challenge for so many communities and so many families and so many readers in our country and around the world. I would say, but you know, access I think we can think of that really in at least two ways these days. Right, access as in? Do we have the physical access? Are the materials? Do they exist in a community? And now I think we also have sort of this renewed political interest in restricting access to books, and I know that I have a feeling that's probably an issue where you and I would align quite well, donalyn.
Speaker 1:Just in the idea that kids must have access to books and this idea of you know, are kids allowed to check out books? That's something that I feel like I as a school librarian, it was something that was on my mind regularly. Right, because we have policies and things in place. You know if you checked out a book and you didn't return it, and you know if you had kids who checked books out four years ago and didn't return it and their family did not have the money to pay for it, there was a chance that kids still weren't having access to books, you know all that time later. So yeah, it's a multi-layered challenge and I think it's getting a little stickier as time goes on.
Speaker 3:Well, I took this on in Game Changer, really, and then I really have addressed it with a lot of my public forward writing sense, in that when we're talking about access, we're talking about physical access, of course, access to the text themselves. That also means access to the technology that young people might need to be able to access that text. So audio book, ebook access, the Wi-Fi access to be able to use those things. We're also looking at kids who might need assistive technology in order to access a piece of text because they need some support. So that is all just physical access to me. But then we're also looking at intellectual access. How are we giving and this is exactly what you're talking about, right, how are we giving kids access to the world of our ideas? And then we're looking at social and cultural access. How are we giving kids access to the world of our people? And those last two are the ones that I think people are actively trying to suppress. You know they don't want kids to have intellectual or cultural access.
Speaker 1:For various reasons. That's exactly right, and I appreciate that you have addressed that so wholeheartedly in your Game Changer book, because, yeah, it definitely can take some creative thinking for teachers to continue to offer as broad access as possible for their students. So, oh, yes, yeah, it's important work for sure. So, donalyn, what do you want listeners to know about your work?
Speaker 3:Like what is my work? That would be the question. Right, I had someone introduce me at a conference over the summer as an independent scholar, and I've been kind of thinking about that ever since, because I'm not affiliated with the school district or university, I don't have a PhD, so, but I am someone who studies all of this anyway, so I guess the term independent scholar fits as much as anything. If I were to really be a scholar, of anything I would name, I would say it's the word reader. I study the word reader. And how do we see ourselves in that word and how do we see ourselves positively in that word? And how do we see ourselves negatively in that word? And how the heck did we get there and how has that shaped us as people? You know I really am.
Speaker 3:I'm also a little bit of a fan of nerd culture, and by this I mean I love nerdy people getting their nerd on. I don't even care what it's about, I just I am obsessed with watching people get their nerd on. I love it. I mean I love Taylor Swift because she's so nerdy, she just is. I mean, look, she's a reader, she wears cardigans, she loves cats. If she wasn't who she is. I think she might be a librarian at this point in her life.
Speaker 1:You know, I think you might be right, or she would own like a cat cafe full of books, right? Yes, yes.
Speaker 3:Okay, so I have a friend here who is he's a 50 year old man obsessed with Star Trek, totally into it, but I mean romance novelists. I have a friend who is a middle school teacher in Illinois who also writes romance novels and she's introduced me to a whole thing of their culture. So I think my, and then of course, the access piece, and I mean the big A access, like I described it. So if I wanted people to know anything about my work, I would say that I study readers, I study nerds and I study access.
Speaker 1:I love that.
Speaker 3:And the confluence where those three things come together is kind of where I sit. I'm also very powerfully committed to the idea that we should continuously be asking ourselves who does reading belong to anyway? Because reading doesn't belong to schools. Reading doesn't belong to English teachers and, as heretical as the statement might be, reading doesn't belong to librarians either. Reading belongs to readers. That means the young people in front of us who are readers themselves. The phrase real world really bothers me when we say, well, when you get out in the real world, kids, they are in it. They're in it right now. They're not waiting to be part of the real world. You and I've worked with middle schoolers. They're living the real world. If we do not make reading seem enticing, engaging, enjoyable, worthwhile in any way while young people are in school with us, why would they continue doing it? So, anyway, I have feelings you can tell about this topic.
Speaker 1:Well, I think this is such an important distinction because it really is as if reading has sort of been colonized by the school atmosphere, right. And then it does place a very limiting view of what reading is and what it can do in our lives. And I know a lot of the readers I work with. They seem to fall into at least two camps. One is just that reading is a school-based task. I do it when I have to and I get out of it what somebody tells me to. And then I think you see some other readers who maybe see themselves as readers, but they have to guard their personal reading identity from the influence of school, right, it's almost like they have to read outside of school in order to maintain who they are as readers.
Speaker 3:They're underground.
Speaker 1:They're underground readers, exactly In your words.
Speaker 3:Yes, Split personalities. You have one reading life at school and another reading life that really belongs to you somewhere else.
Speaker 1:Right, Right. It's a little bit bizarre that here we are kind of in this moment where reading, the act of reading, has been utilized in such a way within school that it actually limits reading in so many ways, and I think that that can be particularly by the time young people get to middle school, and I think that that can be particularly by the time young people get to middle school. I think that can be a very challenging misconception to help them navigate right that reading does in fact belong to them and that they can read what they want to, they can learn about things they want to and they can build community around what they want to know and how they are engaging in reading behaviors.
Speaker 3:I'm really studying reading communities right now because you know my longtime collaborator, colby Sharp, and I, his fifth graders, we're just. I can write about how to set up a classroom library collection, right. I can write about conferring with kids. I can describe those things. But that magic of where I can stand in Colby's classroom and I see a kid get up from their desk, walk over to the classroom library collection, pull a book off the shelf, walk over to a classmate at their table, put that book on their desk how do you teach that? How do you teach it? And yet I have watched it happen year after year after year after year in classrooms like mine and classrooms like Colby's and classrooms like many other teachers right. So I'm kind of interested in that, because many of our communities are not.
Speaker 3:Our community-based support systems for almost everything have changed dramatically over the past 30 years, let's just say, and I think our community of support for readers has changed quite dramatically and whilst public communities for reading have changed or perhaps even disappeared, the role of communities in school becomes even more important.
Speaker 3:In just cooking readers in school becomes even more important in just cooking readers, you know, and just cultivating a place where joyful reading can even occur. We could just change how we talk to kids about reading. I think it would help a lot. I mean, there are a lot of systemic things going on here that are beyond the ability of a single teacher, administrator or librarian to do anything except, you know, try to work around. But we could change the way we talk to kids about reading. We could make it sound less painful. You know, terry and I used to talk about this that people are suspicious of joy at school. Right, like, if we don't organize the joy, make a rubric for the joy, schedule the joy, why is joy happening, you know? And if kids are enjoying reading too much, it must not be that rigorous, right it's so true.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's so true, and it really, it really is kind of scary isn't it that?
Speaker 1:you know, because, Donald, and as you were talking about, you know how do we arrive at those moments. I really do think of them as being somewhat magical and they're really um, it's improv, right, it's, it's improvised, it's not something that you can necessarily schedule Like right. Nobody has in their plans. At 10, 13, you know, um, Jill is going to recommend a book to her friend. It just doesn't work that way. I think that there's just this tension between what is expected in schools and how schools are expected to function, and finding the space for that and I think that that is one of so many tensions that often individual teachers are working within in their own classrooms is, you know, how do we maintain that space for improvisation and for reactions and reactions to occur that aren't sort of scheduled or linked to a standard or related to the learning objective of the day?
Speaker 3:But what we're talking about is how are the children in front of us actually influencing the work in a classroom? And if there is no jazz improv, if none of that's happening, then you're not. When I was a new teacher Okay, I'm tripping over myself a little here, but you're thinking while you're talking. When I was a new teacher, I remember them talking to us about teachable moments, about being good kid watchers and reflective practitioners. What are the kids telling us they know? What are they telling us they need? What are they telling us they need next?
Speaker 3:And one size does not fit all. The very minute we decide we're doing everything the same for every single child in our care, we are making a decision to leave out some kids. Now there may be short-term justifications where that may need to happen in order to provide equitable learning opportunities for all kids, but it shouldn't be just the way we run things. We march through the curriculum all the kids like little soldiers, and their lives, their experiences, their opinions, their readiness, their beliefs are not considered at all. That doesn't really sound like an education to me. It sounds like brainwashing or indoctrination, and it honestly sounds kind of boring and awful not just for kids either. I mean, can we just admit that I don't think my path to self-actualization as a human being is going to occur by marching through the teacher's guide one day after the other. It sounds exhausting and awful. Maybe that's just me, I don't know. Maybe it does. Don't we want education to be something that the children participate in, and not just something that is done to them?
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely, and, like you said, it's not written in the margins of the teacher's guide.
Speaker 1:That's not how we arrive at those moments where the true learning happens, or those rich connections where an individual child in our classroom is able to connect something they're learning with something they know from their past, from their interests. You know, those are the kinds of things that you're not going to find in the script and I think if that is where our focus is directed and in many instances I think that's where our focus is then held by policies, it really does become. I always think of it as like in grayscale, whenever I think about the classroom I want to be in. It's colorful, it's lively, it's energetic. There's that productive hum that happens in great classrooms. And when I think about where so many policies have pushed us over the last several decades, I do often like the image that comes to mind is just sort of in grayscale, right, like all of that color is sort of drained out and we're just sort of left going through the motions without that joy, because you can't schedule it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it is. It is a giver. It's like a giver with no Taylor Swift cameo. Can I just say that it's true, it is a giver. It's like a giver with no Taylor Swift cameo. Can I just say that.
Speaker 1:It's true.
Speaker 3:It's true, we've bled all the color out of it. You're absolutely right, and we've made it a joyless place in order to systematize some things. Engagement and motivation doesn't seem to be discussed as much as it was when I was a new teacher. And I'm just wondering I mean, it's been 20 years, of course was when I was a new teacher, and I'm just wondering, I mean, it's been 20 years. Of course we know how the pendulum swings, but how can we have any conversations about teaching learning that don't involve engagement and motivation?
Speaker 3:With reading, what I see is kids are buried with goals that are not theirs. I mean, we pile so many reading goals on top of kids, but if all of their reading goals are external reading goals, then reading itself is not intrinsically motivating to the child. So they've got to have some skin in the game. I mean, even if okay, even if something like letting them pick with genres of books they read. You know people have asked me about this for a long time. They, what do you do with the kids in your class that just don't read? And I will tell them I don't have that many.
Speaker 3:To be honest, you know you kind of just set the tone that this is language arts class. We read and write in here. It's kind of what we do, it's kind of why you're here, but sometimes you'll get to choose what you get to read and sometimes you'll get to choose what you get to write about, and we'll all negotiate that together. You'll get to make your choices too. I think that's where you can still meet some academic goals with kids but get them to buy in a little bit, because they do have a little bit of choice. They do have a little bit of agency. They do have a little bit of autonomy. Whether or not you're reading and writing in my classroom is not really something we're going to talk about in detail.
Speaker 1:Right, it just is right. This is just like you said. It's just what we do. This is the space where this happens.
Speaker 3:No one goes to the math teacher and goes. You know, I'm just not feeling it today, you know. But we let them do that with reading and writing.
Speaker 3:It just blows my mind. You know, but you know. But, yes, your choices and what you read matter just as much here. So I think that's the tone that we're setting. But if we're not, if we're not paying any attention at all to the decline in motivation and engagement for reading Scholastic documented this in their kids and family reading report, which they did for many years.
Speaker 3:I wish they would pick it back up again. It was great Survey that they did of tens of thousands of American school children and their caregiving adults, and what they documented over decades was what they've now coined the decline by nine, the drop off in kids reading interest, self-reported reading interest that starts at about the age of nine. And those of us who've worked in middle school we know there's no magic pendulum where they're swinging back and suddenly rediscovering reading in the seventh grade without some significant adult role modeling and support influence. You know we have to make it sound exciting again to get them back. So what's going on with our eight and nine-year-olds? You know, that's the question maybe we could all be asking, because we're all worried that our teenagers are not reading. Well, how far back does it go? According to this Kids and Family Reading Report, the peak years for kids to tell us that they like reading is eight, nine.
Speaker 1:Right, and I think that, particularly in the environments where you and I have worked in Texas and Florida respectively I think we've seen kind of the stronghold of standardized, high-stakes, standardized testing has really, I think, impacted that, because you know, as soon as you say decline by nine, what do I automatically think of?
Speaker 1:Well, third grade, right, yeah me too, third grade right and whether that is the causation. There is certainly a correlation there, right? This is when this tends to happen and you're right, unless you have someone sort of showing you the way back to a life of reading, an interest in reading, goals and ambitions and interests that are driven by you, you the reader. I think there are some readers who never pick that back up.
Speaker 3:There are people walking around who graduated from high school and it was a sigh of relief to them that they never had to read another book. You know that's right. So and then we complain that parents don't read and their kids don't read. Well, if we want reading role models for our kids, I think we need to graduate some, because their parents were in our classrooms 15 years ago and we didn't spark a love of reading with them there and now we expect them to be phoenixes, rising from the ashes of their own reading failure and discovering reading now that they've given birth. It just doesn't.
Speaker 1:It doesn't work that way. It doesn't really work that way. It doesn't work that way.
Speaker 3:It doesn't really work that way, you know. It's interesting that you and I are so quick to identify standardized testing as one of the primary reasons this happens, because I should talk to teachers and librarians about the decline by nine in my workshops and I will let them just talk at their tables to try to identify some of the things that they think are leading kids away. And even though standardized testing is always a significant answer in the room, a lot of people will tell me that it's technology, technology. Technology technology is the reason that kids are not reading. I'm like do you really think that this is all the drop-off 20% drop-off that we can document in just a couple of years is a bunch of eight-year-olds getting cell phones. I don't know that. That's completely true.
Speaker 1:In today's day and age. I think that there are a lot of kids who have more or less unrestricted access to technology well before the age of nine, and so I don't see that as a strong factor. I also think that it kind of begs the question as to you know what? Are kids, back to your word, allowed to read? What actually counts as reading, if they're reading a news article or even if they are watching a video? I tend to think of text and reading in a very broad sort of sense, and I know a lot of what we've talked about so far is really book-based reading, but there are so many other ways to read and engage with reading in the world. Technology does not seem like the thing to me that would interfere in this decline by nine.
Speaker 3:Well, I will just say I just saw it come across my feed today so I will go investigate. But apparently there's just been a meta-analysis looking at digital reading and seeing that it is not better for comprehension than print. So we need to one recognize that print media still needs to be some of the primary text access that kids have. The digital is not yet substituting for it from a comprehension development standpoint. Let me be careful. But I want kids to read on anything. They will read on, and I know kids that will read entire books on their cell phones. They will read them.
Speaker 3:So we have to value all the literacies that we're bringing to the table here. We've got family literacies, oral literacies, visual literacy. We've certainly got information literacy that you and I probably care a lot about these days. We have all the different formats that we can access information and entertainment and stories from and kids. They're largely self-taught in most of those literacies, so how can we teach them the tools that they need to be safe, to be smart, to expand their own learning for themselves through all the types of literacies that they are practicing on a regular basis? The definition of literacy is expanding and even I, someone with the moniker as the book whisperer am not such a Luddite that I do not understand the potential of all the different literacies that we have. I enjoy them myself and I think we should value them with students. It's also another reason why they treat print media as like a dinosaur.
Speaker 1:Right, when that is the only thing that's sort of shoved in their direction. I think that it can read as a disconnection from the rest of the world that they live in, particularly for some young people who are very much engaged in online worlds and online reading. Yeah, I saw that study also, and it's definitely something I'm going to take a deeper dive into, because I'm very interested in what their measures were. What was their criteria for the studies that they selected?
Speaker 3:What equitable access did the kids have to the technology and all these? I don't know.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 1:And also, I would wonder you know, how is comprehension measured? Because I think that that's a question that I've thought a lot about really since the days of accelerated reader and you know, when that became such a hot idea in schools and while it did seem to get some competitive kids engaged in reading, for others it really turned them off, I think, because you know, if their interpretation of a text didn't match the five questions that they were forced to respond to at the end of a book, you book, it begs the question what exactly is comprehension and how do we in fact measure that in a way that is valid and reliable and meets readers where they are and where their understanding of a text actually comes into play? So, yeah, there are just so many, I think, complex questions that it really does bring me back to something you stated earlier in this idea of who does reading belong to, and particularly whenever we, I think, whenever we read studies like that, when I know, when I think critically about ideas like that, it brings me right back to all of those questions who's owning the reading? What are we actually measuring? So it's definitely a topic that I think is worth pursuing for anyone who cares about reading and understanding.
Speaker 3:Well, you could get existential here. What do we mean by reading?
Speaker 3:I mean really you really go pretty deep in the weeds here on the questions like this, but I have to ask myself, you know, if kids are largely self-taught in the uses of those devices and we're seeing again and again that the comprehension strength on equitable measures is not the same as it is with the print right Then what do we need to teach kids about digital reading? That's the question I'm asking. You know, that's what I'm thinking about. Okay, so they're teaching themselves and it's not perhaps getting them where they need to go. Are we just going to decide that we don't need to care about them reading on devices? Well, of course not. Look at the world that they're already in. So how can we teach them to read on those things better? You know, that's what I'm thinking of here.
Speaker 1:And how do we help them get what they need?
Speaker 3:Yeah, gosh, I talked to so many librarians about AI at the workshop I was at last week up in Dallas and oh, that's another topic that's coming towards us. The train is coming towards us, whether we want to deal with it or not. So, and I think the literacy and library community is very tangled in that conversation already. We're looking at copyright, we're looking at intellectual property and freedom. We're also looking at what do we mean by art? I mean, what do we mean by the language arts? There's a lot of turmoil in the literacy and library world right now and I don't think you and I perhaps knew that we were getting ourselves into that when we became educators, but no, I could not have foreseen this moment, but it is a challenge.
Speaker 1:I think there are some really wonderful opportunities. You know, it kind of reminds me of, you know, other sort of freak out moments that we've had in the world of education where you know, there's this great technology, there's this wonderful opportunity, but, wait, nobody knows how to use it properly. In air quotes, right, and so figuring out what that is and how do we in fact support learners to navigate the world, like you said that they're already in, I think that it does no one any kind of service to pretend that these things don't exist or that we are going to, in some really strong way, kind of restrict access to it. I think instead, we have to learn how to navigate and we have to help young learners and readers also navigate this world, because it is definitely a world they're going to be growing up in and growing through. So how do we use AI technologies responsibly and in positive kinds of ways, rather than, you know, just sort of trying to distance ourselves or pretend, you know, take the ostrich approach, like it's not really happening?
Speaker 3:Because it's happening, whether we want it to or not. The world is happening. That's right. I'm also looking a bit about empathy. I've been reading a lot about the decline in empathy in our society that they're documenting, and of course, social media is one of the factors that they're looking at. The decline of just community-based social support structures, where we're caring for one another, is another piece of it. But we've had a couple of studies now that show that reading books, particularly fiction, fosters empathy. Reading books, particularly fiction, fosters empathy.
Speaker 3:And I do feel that one of the things that we might have done with the influence on standardized testing is redirected what the goal of a liberal arts education was supposed to be in the first place, which was to make us better human beings. You know, all stories are the Earth story, right, like every single story ever written, is about trying to become us better human beings. You know, all stories are the Ur story, right, like every single story ever written, is about trying to become a better human being, and it's this idea that we've forgotten that piece of it. When we've turned reading into a skill that must be performed and measured, we've lost the transformative part of the conversation. You know, terry, and I talked about this in the joy of reading.
Speaker 3:Reading is an act of transformation. It's not a performance and we've turned it into a performance and it's a skill to be measured. And yes, it is a skill. Kids who are not capable and confident readers are not enjoying reading. We were. I don't think kids can just go magically, go into a library and just become readers. That's I think I'm trying to say. They need our support in all the ways that they can get it.
Speaker 1:They don't necessarily just absorb books just by being in their presence. You know, I tried that one time. I had a hard test to study for and I slept on the book. I'm not real sure that it actually got me anywhere.
Speaker 3:No, no. So of course, high quality instruction is always going to be a part of the conversation, but is it high quality instruction if the kids' voices are never considered?
Speaker 1:Right, it reminds me of a few things that you said earlier.
Speaker 1:Just, you know that readers have got to have some stake in the game.
Speaker 1:How do we get them to their own goals, rather than goals that are sort of imposed upon them or, as you said, buried with goals that are not theirs? And everything we've talked about so far really reminds me of how important it is for our learning environments to be learner-centered, right, and that is something that I think high-stakes, standardized, skills-based kind of testing where everything is performative and not necessarily internalized. I think that those two things stand in stark contrast to me. There's just this tension between what the systems of schools really force teachers and learners to do versus what learning looks like, and, at least in my view, in the last 20 years that I've spent in education, you know, after being a K-12 student, that is it. Just it reminds me that so often our policies are imposed upon education from people who do not come from within the field of education. They maybe have never observed learners in their natural habitat or in the wild, so to speak, and it's put teachers and learners in just some really difficult, really soul-sucking kinds of positions.
Speaker 3:One size does not fit all.
Speaker 3:One size does not fit all, and kids need a reason to persist. What's the learning for? How is? And again and again, they think that the purpose of reading is to complete the activities that they're assigned to go with the reading. The reading itself is not I don't want to say not meaningful, but it's not even the point of the reading. The purpose of the reading is to complete reading-related activities after they are done with the reading or sometimes while they're reading.
Speaker 3:You know annotations, marginalia, all of these copying vocabulary words we bury kids with so much work, often just for the purposes of generating grades. We can't even really point to an academic reason why it's taking place, other than language arts. Teachers need grades in the grade book. So I mean and kids tell me this, and teachers tell me this, I'm required to have X number of grades, so I need my kids to do X, y, z. And kids, why are you doing this?
Speaker 3:Well, the teacher gave us this paper and I have to answer these questions. I mean, you don't need someone with an education background to go in and ask these questions. The kids and the teachers will tell you these answers. So I agree with you. There are people who do not have an education background who are honestly running some of these conversations, I feel, and it's not that they don't have an education background, it's that they don't even care about asking the questions to the people who are actually there. And it's confirmation bias kind of stuff, where we're asking the questions to the people we know are going to give us the answers that we want.
Speaker 1:Right, Well, and, as you said, talking to teachers and kids puts you in a very different space of that conversation than you know an echo chamber of someone else who's designing poor policy and also still not as valid as the kids and the teachers themselves.
Speaker 3:I'm not there, you know. So I have grandchildren who love to tell me all about their school experiences on a regular basis. Right now I have a 15-year-old, a 12-year-old and a six-year-old, so I'm representing the full K-12 spectrum right now with just my grandchildren. And you know, as a middle school teacher, if you have respect with your middle, if they know you respect them and that's what I mean If your middle schoolers know that you respect them, they will tell you everything they will, they will. So it's about relationship building. It's about really paying attention to the children and to teachers and then just providing the support and the resources in order for the majority of our kids I mean, really we want it to be all of them but for our kids to be confident, competent readers who don't hate it when it's all over.
Speaker 1:I really like those two words confident and competent readers because I think that that is what helps us to get to a place where we see ourselves as readers and where we see ourselves as continuously growing in our identity as readers. Yeah, I really like those two kind of key words. And this actually takes us very naturally to my last question for you, donalyn. Given the challenges of today's educational climate, what message do you want? Teachers?
Speaker 3:to hear. You may be the best reader and writer that your students know. Even if you don't feel that way yourself, don't miss an opportunity to show them what's joyful about it, because if you aren't going to, they might not get it this year. We can't control everything that is affecting the literacy development of our students right now. Would that education was actually in the hands of teachers and parents. But what we can do is this Can we make a promise to ourselves that the students in our care will have more positive reading experiences this year than they have negative ones?
Speaker 1:Because I think that is in our control back to what can we do today, what can we do tomorrow in order to best serve the young people who are right in front of us who, as you said, you may be the best reading and writing role model they have, and certainly you may be the person they have as a reading and writing role model for the longest period during a day, and so I think that that is such an important message, and I think it really does help to sort of recenter energy and hopefully give us a little bit of that, a little more encouragement to keep on with the good work. Yes, yes. Well, donalyn, I thank you so much for your time today and I thank you for your tremendous contributions to the field of education and reading.
Speaker 3:I appreciate the invitation. I've really enjoyed our conversation and I hope it's useful for the people who enjoy it later. Thank you, so do I.
Speaker 2:Donalyn Miller is known for her work as the Book Whisperer, the title of her first book published in 2009. Since then, donalyn has written Reading in the Wild and co-authored Game Changer, book Access for All Kids and the Common Sense Guide to your Classroom Library with Colby Sharp, as well as the Joy of Reading with Terry Lesane. With her friend and collaborator, colby Sharp, donalyn co-founded the Nerdy Book Club blog, which provides daily inspiration, book recommendations, resources and advice about raising and teaching young readers. Donalyn is the founder of the annual summer hashtag book a day challenge and co-hosts, along with Colby Sharp, the monthly Twitter chat hashtag title talk, a monthly chat about books and reading. From 2014 to 2019, donalyn served as Scholastic Book Fair's Ambassador of Independent Reading Advocacy, traveling to conferences and schools as a reading ambassador, serving on several Scholastic advisory boards and hosting the web-based teaching tips and book talk show, the Book Whisper. Back to the Books.
Speaker 2:Donalyn's articles about teaching and reading have appeared in publications such as Gifted Child, international Education Week, teacher, the Reading Teacher, voices from the Middle, educational Leadership, educational Leadership Horn Book and the Washington Post. In 2018, donalyn was awarded TCTLA's Edmund J Farrell Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for her contributions to the language arts teaching profession. Donalyn won the inaugural 2013 Terry Lizane Award for Mentorship and Leadership in Young Adult Literature from the Assembly on Literature for Adolescents, or ALLEN, a division of the National Council for the Teachers of English, or NCTE. Donalyn Miller is an award-winning teacher, author and professional development leader who has taught 4th, 5th and 6th grade English, language arts and social studies in the Fort Worth, texas, area.
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