A Conversation with Kelly Gallagher, Part 2. Season 1, Episode 10

Welcome to Season 1, Episode 10 of The Book Love Foundation Podcast! And thank you for joining us in this celebration of teaching and the joy of learning.

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Episode 10 Show notes

This episode is Part 2 of a two-part conversation Penny had recently with Kelly Gallagher. Part 1 appeared in Episode 9.

Thank you for listening to this episode of the Book Love Foundation podcast. The Book Love Foundation is a non-profit 501 3(c) dedicated to putting books in the hands of teachers dedicated to nurturing the individual reading lives of their middle and high school students. We have given away $100,000 in three years and are currently reviewing 140 applications for 2016. We wish we had money to give to every one of these deserving teachers. If you can help us in that mission, visit booklovefoundation.org and make a donation. 100% of what you give goes to books.

– Penny

RESOURCES REFERENCED

Kelly’s web site is where you can find his Article of the Week and many other resources.

Kelly is the author of In the Best Interest of Students (Stenhouse, 2015), Write Like This (Stenhouse, 2011), Readicide (Stenhouse, 2009), Teaching Adolescent Writers (Stenhouse, 2006), Deeper Reading (Stenhouse, 2004), and Reading Reasons (Stenhouse, 2003).  Details and links are available on his website.

SOME FAVORITES FROM KELLY’S CLASSROOM LIBRARY

The Martian, by Andy Weir

Thirteen Reasons Why, by Jay Asher

Everything Everything, by Nicola Yoon

The Rose That Grew from Concrete, by Tupac Shakur

If I Stay, by Gayle Forman

Alabama Moon, by Watt Key

Every Day, by David Levithan

Another Day, by David Levithan

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Creators and Guests

Host

Penny Kittle

Guest

Kelly Gallagher

What is The Book Love Foundation Podcast?

Celebrate the joy of reading with the Book Love Foundation podcast. This is a show filled with information and inspiration from teachers and leaders across grade levels, states, and school systems. We interviewed authors and educators for the first five years and now turn our attention to leaders in public, private, and charter schools. Find out more at booklovefoundation.org or join our book-love-community.mn.co of 2500 educators from 28 countries. We sustain joy together, one kid and one book at a time.

Penny Kittle 0:00
The book Love foundation podcast is produced by the teacher learning sessions, connecting teachers with ideas, experts and each other.

Kelly Gallagher 0:16
The best strategy if you're going to help kids learn better is to first form positive and caring relationships with them.

Penny Kittle 0:30
Welcome back to the book, Love foundation podcast, I'm Penny Kittle and I'm your host. Joining me is Kevin Carlson from the teacher learning sessions

Moderator 0:40
in today's show, part two of Penny's conversation with Kelly Gallagher. In addition to being wonderful teachers authors and advocates for children and literacy, Penny and Kelly are collaborators, soon to be co authors and friends, the first part of their conversation appeared in episode nine. If you haven't heard it yet, please go to teacher learning sessions.com/go/book. Love to check it out. But here is part two, the second half of Penny's conversation with Kelly Gallagher.

Penny Kittle 1:15
Talk to me about the important factors in getting your students to read.

Kelly Gallagher 1:18
Well, first and foremost is, and I've said this for years, is, they have to have interesting things to read, and they have to have access to two interesting texts that sounds, you know, over the top, obvious. But one question I have been fond of asking large groups of teachers over the last number of years is, you know how many of you work in a school in which your faculty has recently had substantial conversations on whether your kids have enough interesting things to read or not? We argue about a lot of things in faculty meetings. Very rarely, if ever, do we argue about, do our kids have access to interesting texts? I teach in a high poverty school. I teach students who come from print poor homes and environments. I teach in a neighborhood that doesn't have a library. I teach in a neighborhood that doesn't have a bookstore, and so you have you know, if I don't provide interesting text, if I don't build a classroom library, if we don't create a book flood situation somewhere on our campus, if there's no access, it's not going to happen. I don't care how motivated we are. So, first and foremost, surrounding kids with books. Secondly, I would say, we have to build in time to read. Many of our kids are hurried after school. A lot of them go to work or soccer practice. You know, I forget who said it, but somebody said, you know, there has to, there has to be three factors for a kid to become a reader, he has to have a book, he has to have a book to read. He has to have time to read, and he has to have a place to read. And for many of my students, the only place where those three factors intersect is at school. Some of my kids have time but not a place, because they live in crowded apartments. Some of my kids have a place, but they don't have time because they have to go to work. And so what I have found is that with my kids, the number one thing that that I need to do to try to turn the tide and get them to see the beauty and value of reading is actually create time in class. Now at my school, we have a mid morning SSR period a couple of days a week. It's it was five days a week for years, and now there are forces who are trying to impede on that. And so, because that time is shrinking, I have found it necessary, even in a what I would consider a short 52 minute daily period, I have to build in time for kids to read. And you and I, of course, have have talked a lot about the value of building in a 10 Minute reading time. I've always built in reading time, but I think where your influence came into play was this idea that that we're going to give kids 10 minutes of reading time every day. And of course, most of us know that that 10 minutes isn't really enough time for kids to develop flow. But the real underlying purpose of our 10 minutes of reading every day in our classrooms is that it provides the teacher with time to confer with three different readers every single day. And that's your idea that I brought into my classroom, that I think is May. An enormous difference in getting my kids up and reading first. And most importantly, it enables me to talk with each and every kid. It enables me to get I know my kids way more. The concern, of course, starting the year was that, you know, my second period has 38 kids in it. How do you confer with 38 kids? And so building in that 10 minutes every day and meeting with three kids every day, even in a class of 38 I'm going to see every kid three to four weeks. And so this has enabled me to connect with the kids. It's enabled me to put match kids with books. And if you want to look at it at a more sort of a negative side, it has eliminated my kids ability to hide in the class. So this this building it in of conference time every day has been controversial with a lot of teachers, because I give up 10 of my 52 minutes. I give up 20% of my school year to to have kids sit down and read so that I can sit and talk to them about their reading.

Penny Kittle 6:18
Yeah, I, you know, I agree with you that they need longer blocks to read. I think about kids that I have this year who are going home to households with lots of younger siblings and a lot of craziness, and tell me there's no quiet place to be, and that that time in class may be the only time they carve out for reading, and if it's only 10 minutes, you know that's hard to sink into a book and really understand the story, but like you, we have a reading break during our school, which I found that teachers who care very much about kids reading, every kid in that reading break reads, but teachers who are not readers themselves and don't care that much will let kids not read during reading break. And I think that sometimes we forget, even as English teachers, that if a kid leaves the year in your classroom and has not read a book, what does that say about what we value? I a teacher asked me, How do you assess that if you're only talking to kids once a month, if you know, if Kelly galleries got 38 and you can only get to them once a month in that little conference time, how do you assess? How do you know that they're reading? And I think that what we've called knowing they're reading, the quizzes that we often see teachers giving on chapters of whole class novels don't represent reading necessarily. So how would you answer that?

Kelly Gallagher 7:36
Well, I think of Richard Allington, you know, Dick Allington, who says, you know, reading is more about opportunity than ability. If you do not have the opportunity to read, you will not develop the ability to read. And I think there is a clear and undeniable relationship between time spent reading and good things happening in people's lives. There's a number of studies that have borne this out, that people who read a lot, you know, benefit in a lot of ways, that kids who do not. I don't really think it's critical that 20 years from now, that my kids remember the theme and To Kill a Mockingbird. I think what's important, although I certainly would like them to but I think what's really more important is that kids are Active readers and are dialed in. And, you know, literate adults, the level of illiteracy that's going on in this country right now concerns me, the lack of critical thinking it's going on when you open up the newspaper, concerns me. And so I'm not an I'm not simply an English teacher. I'm a literacy teacher, and I believe that all teachers have two callings. One is to teach their content, but two is to get kids jazzed about going off into life and continually reading in that content area. If you're a history teacher and your kids leave high school and never read history again, I think on some level, you have failed. If I'm an English teacher and my kids no longer would want to read a novel after getting out of high school, I think I have failed. It's a bigger issue than simply getting to this year's, you know, state tests.

Penny Kittle 9:26
Yeah, as you and I have said, The Hidden standard that's not written in the Common Core is, do students find joy in reading? Do they love to read? Right?

Kelly Gallagher 9:38
And so, you know, this approach has really cranked up the amount of reading in my ninth grade classes, I have kids who haven't read hardly at all in the last few years, who are on pace to read 1012, 2025, books this year. And. And I'm, I'm beginning to see it a little bit in their writing. I'm beginning to see more fluency, more development. You know, it's taken me a number of months to get a few of these kids to really, really gain deep reading and writing traction. But I can guarantee you that deep reading and writing traction would have never had curd would never had occurred, had we not, had I not built in, you know, the reading and writing time in class for them to do it?

Penny Kittle 10:30
Yeah, I had a boy stop me on the way into class last week, and he said, thank you. And I said, for what he said, This is the second book I've ever read. These two that I've read this year. If you've got a kid who doesn't love reading and you've got to recommend a book, do you have any favorites in your class that you go to?

Kelly Gallagher 10:52
Well, I think that depends on the kid and who the kid is, you know, and that comes back to knowing who your kids are, so I wouldn't say generically that they're, you know, this this year's sort of different. There isn't like the hot dystopia book or the hot vampire book, but there are a number of really good books, you know, earlier this year, the Martian came out. So many of my kids read The Martian. That book got passed around a lot. Think about my ninth graders. Another book that got passed around a lot is 13 Reasons why my students love that book. There's a new book out, a newer book, everything, everything that a number of my ninth graders have read that's a book about a kid who is in a bubble because the kid is ill and cannot be exposed to germs, and it develops into sort of a love story. So there are generic titles or bigger titles, then there's older books that still maintain their popularity, like tupac's book of poetry, or, yeah, you know, books like, if I stay Yeah, those books are always pretty, pretty popular.

Penny Kittle 12:13
But have you read Alabama moon?

Kelly Gallagher 12:15
I have not.

Penny Kittle 12:16
It's so funny. I stopped two boys, big strapping boys in their car hearts and their big hiking boots. And I was just making small talk, you know, what are you guys reading? They both at the same time, Alabama moon. And I was like, whoa. I've forgotten about that book entirely, but another one that tends to hook some of the boys I know.

Kelly Gallagher 12:34
So that means I will be ordering that on Amazon the moment this interview is over.

Penny Kittle 12:38
But you know what? It's definitely an in the woods on your own kind of book. So I'm not sure how well it transfers to Anaheim, unless they've become interested seeing all those lovely photos of our place and all

Kelly Gallagher 12:49
okay. Warning accepted.

Moderator 12:54
Kelly joked about hopping on Amazon as soon as this interview ends, if he wanted to, he could go to teacher learning sessions.com/store. Buy Alabama moon or any of the other books in the book talk and help support the teacher learning sessions. I'll tell you more about that in a little bit.

Penny Kittle 13:18
So talk to me about book clubs this year.

Kelly Gallagher 13:22
Well, we have book clubs going on in both my ninth grade classes and 12th grade classes. As I said, we are dialing down the amount of core works, and we are increasing the amount of book club experiences that kids have. I have to be honest that the book clubs are operating in a way in my class that's much better than just a couple of years ago, but I'm still pretty far away from where I want them to be, because I'm still in the early stages of my career in collecting titles and trying to find, you know, money sources that will buy me, you know, 20 copies of this and 20 copies of that. And in my district, there's a rather daunting adoption process that we must go through in order to even have four kids read the same book at the same time. But having said that this year we've had a cup. I think we're heading into our third book club experience. The first time we did it, we simply just picked five really sort of high interest titles, mixing fiction and nonfiction and mixing ability level and the success of those book clubs and getting kids who are traditionally not readers up and going made me realize one of the one of the mistakes I've made this year is I waited too long into the year to begin the book club experience. And. I started with a large chunk of independent reading time, weeks of independent reading with the idea of of that would be the best approach to get kids to gain reading traction. But what I found was that kids who hardly read at all in the first month, you know, those serial abandoners, once they got into book clubs. Actually, that was the vehicle in which sort of turned the corner for them.

Penny Kittle 15:28
That was true for me, too, Kelly, and that's because you pushed me there.

Kelly Gallagher 15:32
So I think the idea is, is that we'll, I'm going to start them much earlier next year. We're in our second and third lap. The second lap, we actually gave them 12 titles in which to choose from. So I was fortunate to get some funding from my school district to pilot this approach. And it's, it's really interesting, you know, like, for example, I had two different small groups. Chose a book called every day. It's about a person. It's a fictional obviously a work of fiction, obviously, because it's about a person who wakes up in a different body every day. And when the kids were over, when that book club experience was over, we went into a sort of a new three to four week timeframe, and I said to the kids, you know what? For the next three to four weeks, you have a choice. You can go back and read independently. You can pick something you want to read and read by yourself or on your own. You could you can create your own new book clubs. And what happened was those eight or nine kids who read that went out in the world and found that every day has a sister sequel. It's not really a sequel, it's just the same story told by another point of view, through another point of view called another day. And so, on their own. They said, you know, Mr. Gallagher, we want to form our own book clubs. And so now what's happening is they're beginning to take ownership of their own decisions on what they want to read, and they're creating their own book club partners and environments. And that's just something that doesn't happen in a classroom where all you teach is core novels,

Penny Kittle 17:21
yeah, and, you know, I've, I've watched kids create these mini swirls of deciding to read in a theme or an idea together, and have loved it in the past. But I think, what I think is different about book clubs than independent reading and core works is that they begin to develop a community of people that they read with. And I know that's been important in your faculty. And I just think that as readers who live in the world, I love it when someone's read the book I've read, and we can have these conversations, and that's what we're getting kids to imitate,

Kelly Gallagher 17:50
agreed. And I think the sense of community, as I mentioned earlier, for some of the kids who traditionally don't read, was a was a very, very strong inducement for them. I think of a kid in my senior class. I often talk about Daniel. Daniel is a kid, a 12th grader, who told me he hasn't read a book since the fifth or sixth grade. He had trouble getting started, but he kind of spun his wheels for the first month of school, but when he went into his first book club. Something took, something about that community, something about having other people his own age to discuss the book with, spurred him. And although Daniel is not going to close his gap in one year as a 12th grader reading at about the sixth grade level. I anticipate looking at how he has gone since that book club. I believe that Daniel is going to be a kid who finishes this year having read eight or nine books, which I think for a kid like that is a remarkable achievement given the fact that he hasn't read a book since the sixth grade,

Penny Kittle 19:05
right. And it's Richard allenton again saying struggling readers will never become proficient unless we dramatically increase volume. And that kid is dramatically increasing volume, and

Kelly Gallagher 19:16
volume has been sort of my mantra the last year on the road. I don't care how good the reading and writing standards are, if kids don't read and write a whole lot more than they're currently reading and writing, it's just not going to happen. And so this is, you know, a big idea behind the way that both you and I, more me than you, has have restructured my classroom because a curriculum that's a mile wide and an inch deep is not going to serve my kids if they're not reading and writing. I don't care that, I can check off, oh, I covered the standards this year in my classroom, and I want to come back to. Your idea that you said earlier in the early in the conversation, I think we need a mind shift that, yes, we're planning units, and yes, we know we're going to teach certain stuff, but what we're really teaching are kids, and we're really teaching is readers and writers, and they are the curriculum, and we're looking at their needs and looking at where they are, is where we start, and trying to figure out how to create a classroom that's conducive to making them readers and writers. I don't start the year by thinking, what's my test question going to be for To Kill a Mockingbird? I start my year by thinking, are these kids reading and writing enough? And if the answer is no, what am I going to do about it?

Penny Kittle 20:57
I love that so well said. We usually end our podcast with a story about a particular kid. And you told us about Daniel. Is there another kid you want to talk about?

Kelly Gallagher 21:07
Well, I think Daniel is an example of, you know, anybody who's been in the classroom as long as we've been, we have lots of stories. Sometimes they're not, you know, academically as obvious. You know, I've had kids come back to me 20 years later and say, you know, the one thing that you did that helped me was that you commented that I brought a warmth and a smile to my classroom every day, which gets to something I tweeted this morning. You know, the best strategy if you're going to help kids learn better is to first form positive and caring relationships with them. One of my favorite which brings me to one of my favorite stories is, is I had a kid, Aurelio, who I didn't really felt connected all that much with me. You know, he was polite, he he came. This is probably 1520, years ago. You know, he was a good kid. But one day, I don't even remember this, one day in class, I was complaining about how crappy my chair, my teacher chair, was at my desk. It was a standard issue school chair, and it was killing my back. Well, months later, the last few weeks of school, I get to school early. It's still dark out, and Aurelio has pulled his car up to my classroom door, and there he's purchased for me a brand new leather chair, no way, and sitting there, right? And so, and here's a kid that does not have a lot of money. So, you know, it's a cliche, and I'm paraphrasing it, but somebody has said often that 20 years from now, they're not going to remember what you taught them. They're going to remember how you treated them, and if you treat them with this idea that you can be a reader and that you can be a writer, and there's a richness that comes to your life. I think that is why we still get up and do it after 31 years each of teaching that it's that connection with kids and this understanding that what we're doing is important and what we're doing is extraordinarily difficult.

Penny Kittle 23:24
So true, so true. Thank you for your time this morning, Kelly,

Kelly Gallagher 23:29
you're welcome, Penny. It's nice talking with you once again.

Moderator 23:36
Thank you for listening to this conversation between Penny Kittle and Kelly Gallagher in this episode, you heard the second half of their conversation. You can listen to episode number nine to hear the first half. If you're interested in the books mentioned in this podcast, please visit the teacher learning sessions bookstore at teacher learning sessions.com/store. It is an online bookstore that features the titles mentioned in our podcasts along with other books for teachers. We run the store through Amazon, and we earn a small commission on the sales buying. There is a way you can show your support for the teacher learning sessions, which will help us continue to produce podcasts like this one, and you also get the books you want. That is a win win win situation. Thank you very much. That's a teacher learning sessions. COMM slash store.

Penny Kittle 24:30
Thank you for listening to this episode of the book Love foundation podcast. Can you help us reach potential donors? Send a link of this podcast to people you know and encourage them to help us with this mission. Help us bring the joy of reading to more teenagers. Help us create a love of reading in every school. Help teachers build reading lives that last. Thank you so much for listening. I'm Penny Kittle

Moderator 24:59
next time. On the book Love foundation podcast we hear from kids.

Future Guest 1 25:04
I went from like, in sixth grade, I read 35 books to two books in two years. So that was

Future Guest 1 25:14
a really big downfall.

Future Guest 2 25:15
It's much easier to find good books that you'd like when there's like a library there

Future Guest 3 25:24
at the beginning of the year, I kind of had to force myself to like reading, but then after a little bit, I just liked reading. After that, it was good.

Future Guest 1 25:32
I think I'm up to 16 books, but they've been pretty thick books.

Moderator 25:36
What's your goal for the end of the year?

Future Guest 1 25:38
20?

Moderator 25:39
Okay, you're gonna make

Future Guest 1 25:40
it. Yeah, I'll make it.

Moderator 25:43
Students, students, just like your students talk about how access to a classroom library has changed their reading lives. That's next time on the book Love foundation podcast. Thank you for listening. I'm Kevin Carlson. The book Love foundation podcast is produced by the teacher learning sessions.com. Connecting teachers with ideas, experts and each other.