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Welcome to Season 1, Episode 7 of The Book Love Foundation Podcast! And thank you for joining us in this celebration of teaching and the joy of learning.
Episode 7 Show notes
This episode is Part 1 of a two-part conversation Penny had recently with Donalyn Miller.
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 IN THIS EPISODE
Books:
The Book Whisperer, by Donalyn Miller
Reading in the Wild, by Donalyn Miller
Slasher Girls and Monster Boys, by April Genevieve Tucholke
On Twitter:
co-host of #titletalk with Colby Sharp
co-host of Best Practices Roots (#bproots) with Teri Lesesne
founder of #bookaday
Donalyn is also the co-founder of the Nerdy Book Club.
Other:
Thank you for listening to the The Book Love Foundation Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please share it with a colleague or two.
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Creators and Guests
Host
Penny Kittle
Guest
Donalyn Miller
Middle grade language arts and social studies teacher in the Fort Worth, TX area and the author of "The Book Whisperer" and "Reading in the Wild".
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.
Donalyn Miller 0:16
How do we communicate to children that they are capable and that we believe they can accomplish goals. How are we modeling and demonstrating for them? What literacy really looks like? You know, these are the questions that we can wrap our arms around as teachers and do something with with kids.
Penny Kittle 0:42
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 0:52
There are many wonderful ways that people can describe Donna Lynn Miller, she is a teacher of grades four, five and six. She's the author of the book whisperer and reading in the wild. She co founded the nerdy book club with Colby sharp, and contributes posts there on a regular basis. She co hosts the Twitter chat hashtag title talk with Colby as well. She co hosts the best practices roots, Twitter chat with Terry la saying, which uses the hashtag BP roots. She works for Scholastic book fairs as the manager of independent reading outreach. She's the founder of the hashtag book a day. Donnelly is also a book Love foundation board member, as we did with Penny's conversation with Kylene Beers, because there is so much fantastic and useful material for you, we will release the conversation in two parts this episode. Episode Seven is part one. Part two will be released as episode eight, and will come out tomorrow. If you subscribe to the show on iTunes, you don't need to worry about keeping track of that. The new shows will just appear in your podcast feed. Now here is part one of Penny's conversation with donnalyn Miller,
Penny Kittle 2:10
thank you for spending some time with me this afternoon.
Donalyn Miller 2:13
I'm excited about that. Thank you for inviting me to do it.
Penny Kittle 2:16
Well. You're not only a book Love foundation board member, but you're the book whisperer.
Donalyn Miller 2:25
Sometimes wish I had called myself something else, but I don't even know what that would be. So it's not worth spending any time thinking about.
Penny Kittle 2:32
But well, you're a wild reader, that's for sure. So I'm wondering about this role you have as independent reading ambassador. Is that right?
Donalyn Miller 2:44
Well, my official title is, you know, I'm working for Scholastic book fairs now. And one of the reasons that I book fairs make sense is because they work with every single publisher, and so there's no conflict with anything I do with nerdy book club or anything, but also because they're doing a lot of work in schools and working with principals and working with teachers. So my official title is manager of independent reading outreach. Cool, which sounds like it should come with a sash or something I don't know.
Penny Kittle 3:18
I like though, that it means you're in schools. Yes, that's awesome. So you have done a ton of research on independent reading. And you know, here I sit with a kid today who has never become a reader elementary or middle school, and so in ninth grade, he is so committed to not being a reader that it's been hard all year, and I was kind of despairing today that it'll never get better. And I, you know, when I try to talk to teachers about that in high school, they often just blame the kid, or else they they want to say, you know, in high school, it's just not our job. I can't do that. And I just wondered, you know, what would you say about all that?
Donalyn Miller 4:03
Oh, first, there's just a whole mindset there that is so negative towards kids that it's hard for me to even entertain it. You know, I always try to try to look at this issue of kids and engagement and reading from everyone's point of view, and it's just not always easy for me to to understand where some teachers are coming from at times, because, and I've heard you say this penny, if not us, who, if not now when you know those are not new sentiments as far as reading is concerned, but if it's not going to be us, then what are we doing? You know, we have to believe that we can engage kids with reading, that we can improve their literacy, that we can help them, you know, give them the opportunity to reach their full potential in the ways that we know literacy provides them those opportunities. So So I think it's everyone's job, and I don't just mean teacher's job. I mean it's. Parents jobs. It's our community's jobs. You know, my husband and I were talking this week about when we look at old movies now and they seem so dated because you often see people smoking in a movie. And he said, You just, Don said, you just don't see that anymore. You know, once they made a decision not to include people smoking on television and the movies, you just didn't see it anymore. And Don said, Wouldn't it be great if they show more people reading in the movies than on TV? Because that would be such a positive message about reading that you know that I don't feel sometimes our society is communicating to kids. But back to your question about research, because I am a Rambler, as you know, research does show us that we that we can still engage kids with reading. It's just blaming the child isn't going to get to the root of why that child is disenchanted with reading, why that child doesn't feel like reader is a label that he can own and I think that's the more interesting conversation, because that's what we can do something about. You know, blaming the kid just basically, is a way of giving up. Because, okay, well, whether, whatever role the child's motivations and interests play in this, in this we're, we're the adults in this scenario, and if, if if we don't think it can change for them, why? Why would they think it would change? But I think it goes down to engagement. Really. I've done a lot of study of Brian camborne's work on engagement theory, you know, and looking at what people identify as engagement. And it's interesting to me, engagement has become one of those education buzzwords that we see where you start to ask, you know, are we all really talking about the same thing here? Because I don't think we are. You know, it's like when you're in a staff meeting and someone says, Oh, my mini lesson was 30 minutes. And like, okay, there's a disconnect between what that term means and the way we're really practicing it. But yeah, to me, engagement is is, you know, people say, Oh, well, give them a technology and that's engaging to kids. Well, yes, it is. But the better question, I think, for us as educators, is, what is that technology offering the learner that promotes their engagement? Because if we can get to the root of that, then we can replicate that without technology. It's those conditions that Camborne talks about that, you know, how do we communicate to children that they are capable and that we believe they can accomplish goals? How are we modeling and demonstrating for them? What literacy really looks like, you know, these are the questions that we can wrap our arms around as teachers and do something with, with kids. But it's hard, you know, it's sad to think that that there are 15 and 14 year olds out there in the world and 11 year olds and nine year olds who have just decided already that reader is not a label or a category that they feel like they fit in and they it is interesting to see how they almost wear a label, then proudly of not a reader, yeah, because, I mean, they're 14 years old, it's a little early to start giving up on things. Don't you think? You know I do,
Penny Kittle 8:22
I do and I I think that sometimes when I work with administrators, not in my school district, because mine are all fully committed to reading, but I think that at least what I mean by that is that mine understand that there has to be reading that happens during the school day in order for reading to happen at night, and I find too many places where we want to push the reading of the books you enjoy into the after school hours that are pretty precious already, and that, you know, there are principals who've told teachers you can't do that silent, sustained reading thing in class because, You know, it's not measurable, or it's not a good use of class time, or it's not teaching.
Donalyn Miller 9:05
I just I've said this before. I think I've written it before, but, you know, this just mindset also just baffles me, because I hear it all the time. I get messages from teachers who tell me their administrators have told them they'll come back to their classroom when there's something going on, when when the kids are reading, or administrators who have actually banned read alouds and independent reading in their schools because it's not instructional. But I often wonder, and it sounds flippant to say, but nobody goes down to the basketball coach and says, Hey, why are the kids just dribbling basketballs down here. Nobody goes to the band hall and says, you know, I don't you think the children should be comparing an oboe to a clarinet on a Venn diagram, don't you think that'll improve their musicianship? You know, it sounds stupid and laughable when I say it out loud, but we will still in the same school. Yeah. Go down the hall to the English class and ask why the kids are just reading and writing in here. You know, how do we get better at basketball? How do we get better at playing a musical instrument? How do we become more competent and competent as readers and writers, we read and write a lot. I don't know where they think this practice is going to be taking place, because the idea that nobody would expect their varsity basketball team to only play basketball at home after school, right?
Penny Kittle 10:25
And you know, we all know that the lives of kids have gotten more scheduled, and that if kids don't in my class, if they don't get interested again in their book again and again, then it's easily tossed in the bag and supplanted by the phone or commitments from for other things, whereas, if I give them time to read, sometimes it just sparks that enough of an interest that they return to it again at home. And I also despair for my kids who work. You know, I just quizzed them because we came back from February break, and some of my kids worked every single day of break week, earning money to try to get to college. And where are they going to find time to read if we don't carve out some of our class time for it?
Donalyn Miller 11:09
Well, also we know we can't control how much our kids read at home. And I talked to my elementary colleagues about this a lot, and with the mystical reading log and what they think it tells them and what it doesn't tell them. But you know, to me, a log is no evidence that any reading actually took place. We have all seen kids in our own classrooms who could log minutes and pages forever and never finish a book, never have a successful reading experience. And I know from my middle school experiences, I would have kids walk into my sixth grade class who would tell me they hadn't read a book in years, even though I knew the elementary school they came from required reading logs. So where do we have influence, right? Not control. But where do we have influence? We are our influences in the classroom where we're working with kids, we're using our professional knowledge and our experiences to match them with books they can actually read and that they would be interested in reading. A kid who has made that connection with a knowing teacher is more likely to find books that they're interested in reading, which automatically makes that reading at home more successful. And you know, kids who are engaged with reading at school are more likely to read those books at home. You know, I think right now, Sarah, I, you know, I have a teenager. She's a Junior. Junior year is an insane year. I mean, the child had four hours of homework the first night of school, and it has not let up since then. And we are not stress monkey parents at all, but we are even, you know, daunted by the amount of just assignments that she has to do and studying, and she's been carrying around this anthology of ya stories. I think it's Monster Girls and slasher boys. I don't know if you've seen that, but it's all why it's all ya, some of your kids are probably like it. It's all ya, horror anthology kind of or short stories that are based on classic horror stories or stories from popular culture, like, I Know What You Did Last Summer, or Alice in Wonderland or there. It's really a great anthology, but that's what she's reading right now, because she can, you know, she she doesn't feel like she can commit to a full novel that she might be really reasonably, reasonably reading for more than a month, but so she feels like short stories or something, she can read one, you know, and if she doesn't get back to it in a couple of days, she can get another one. That's the child in my house. That's how she has to manage her reading life. So I understand how challenging it is for high schoolers to even find time to read, you know. And I think about kids who are babysitting little siblings picking them up from school. They're working themselves. They have massive amount of coursework. These are not insignificant challenges. Yeah, we shouldn't just diminish those challenges. When, when I think about all the adults who give me reasons why they can't read and how busy they are,
Penny Kittle 13:58
yeah, I would, I would agree. I think that's pretty powerful. What you just laid out, you know, I've had kids choose short stories or books of poetry, probably for those same reasons and the workload, you know, we're taking the fun out of being a teenager, out of being a young child. That, of course, bothers me, but the escapism of a great book, is something I want for everyone talk to me a little bit about what it means to be a reader in the wild
Donalyn Miller 14:29
in this evolution of my thinking, and I see it in my writing and in my teaching. Even though I don't always feel it, I think it's one of the good reasons for us to write about our teaching so we don't see our own growth sometimes. But, you know, in the book whisperer, I really talked a lot about what teachers should be doing, what teachers should be doing to engage kids with reading, but reading in the wild really kind of moved the ball for me, because talking to all those adult readers and surveying all of them, I was really trying to get at. Okay, you know, schools, teachers cannot. Drive the reading lives of their children, year their students, year after year after year. If we're not passing over the keys to their reading lives, to the children, empowering them with the skills, strategies, motivations that they need in order to remain readers, then what are we doing? It's not enough to have one great year with one great teacher. I have was always dismayed by my own students, who I knew benefited from a reading all the rituals and routines that we had in our classroom, but then I would see them the next year at Target, and they would tell me they didn't read. And I just thought you were such an avid reader, so excited about reading in sixth grade. What happened? You know, I know people change, but it really bothered me, and I realized, you know, that part of it was my students really depended on that environment that I had in my classroom. But those supports were supposed to be temporary. Scaffolds are temporary. They're meant to come down. So, you know, an example I would think, is, I have a lot of book knowledge. I know a lot about children's and young adult literature. I enjoy learning about it. I enjoy reading it myself. And I also know the power that walking into the classroom, putting a book in a kid's hands and saying, the minute I finished this, I knew you needed to have it next. That's power that you know cannot be cannot be replicated in other ways. But what I also had to admit to myself was that it's not about me having all the book knowledge. It's about how am I teaching my students how to find books for themselves without me? Do I use all these resources to be my students sole source of book recommendations, or am I giving them some of these tools so they can use them themselves? You know, it was kind of that evolution in my own teaching that kind of led me to this idea that eventually, wild readers, people who are reading, not chained to a school desk anymore, is how I really came to that title. What a reader is that because I repeat, I don't like the term real world when we apply it to kids. I think it is the real world when we imply that kids are not living in the real world, I think we're diminishing their experiences a little bit. So to me, reading in the wild was reading in the world, but it was all about how schools were just meant to be scaffolding kids to take ownership of reading for themselves. So why do I think that's important? Well, we know that it's, it's it's easy. You may feel this way too. Maybe not easy, but it's it's not difficult to fall into the trap of passing moral judgments against people who don't read. I have to be mindful of that myself and that that I'm a little bit of a zealot in this regard, but I do know the research that shows that people who are readers as adults vote more in elections, volunteer more for charity. They're more likely to attain a college degree. They make higher earnings over their lifetimes. Readers, some research, seems to show readers are more empathetic. They're more socially aware. You know, why wouldn't I want that for the world? You know, there's a little bit of self interest there. I suppose we all want to live in a better world, and I believe that teachers are charged with creating opportunities for their students to become good citizens, I can build a bridge between that idea and reading pretty easily. So how are we going to get to that place?
Moderator 18:19
Next time on the book, Love foundation podcast, how are we going to get to that place? It's part two of Penny's conversation with DONILON Miller. Here's an excerpt.
Donalyn Miller 18:30
You know, I had a little boy AJ, he was in my sixth grade class, I guess, about four years ago, and he, I remember his very first response letter that he wrote to me that year was I refuse. He wrote, dear Mrs. Miller, I refuse to join your little cult of reading. And I was so, I don't want to say offended, but I was so horrified. I was like, Oh, this is where we're starting. Okay, well, put on your put on your shoes, Miller, because you're gonna have to, you know you can't, you can't just walk away from this one.
Moderator 19:04
That's next time on the book Love foundation podcast. If you enjoy the book Love foundation podcast and the work we are doing here at the teacher learning sessions, please join our email list at teacher learning sessions.com/go/book. Love, we will send you a list of the titles from each episode's book talk on the day the show comes out, and you will also receive our weekly newsletter, which includes podcast reviews, insider information about the teacher learning sessions, projects and more that's at teacher Learning sessions.com/go/book. Club. Thanks for listening. I'm Kevin Carlson,
Penny Kittle 19:43
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 20:13
the book Love foundation podcast is produced by the teacher learning sessions, connecting teachers with ideas, experts and each other.