Kim Yaris

The other day, I was in the supermarket. It was a Sunday, the day before a predicted snowstorm. The lines at the checkout were long so I grabbed a magazine to pass the time. I became so absorbed in what I was reading, it was my turn before I knew it. As I moved to the conveyer belt to unload my overflowing cart, I glanced behind me. There was a much older gentleman with five or six items in his wagon. With all I had, this man would easily be waiting an extra ten to fifteen minutes for me to finish so I offered to let him go ahead of me. His response surprised me. His eyes welled with tears as he graciously accepted. He went about his business and as he was leaving, he turned to me and said, “Thank you so much. I’ll be sure to pass it on.” Now it was my turn to well with tears. This simple, sincere gesture had assumed some greater meaning. I was moved that he was moved. It felt good to have made a difference in somebody’s day.

The reluctant writer is the nemesis of every writing teacher. We have all had the conference where a child insists that they have absolutely nothing of value to write about. The only things they ever do is go to school, go home, watch tv, and play video games. According to them, their lives are boring; therefore, they have nothing to write about.

In talking with students like this, I have come to realize that they think they have to live fantastic lives in order to be a writer. Part of being a writing teacher is helping them realize that fantastic is a state of mind. They need to come to understand that they don’t have to have taken a fancy vacation or experienced something extraordinary in order to have a story to tell. Great ideas are lurking everywhere. Even in the supermarket.

I have listened in on many reading conferences that sound more like inquisitions than conversations. “Who’s the main character? What’s the problem? Where does the story take place?” Children obediently respond but I often find myself wondering as I walk away, “Aside from confirming this child can recall literal details from the story, what do I know about this child as a reader?”

This question has forced me to reflect on my own conferences and take measures to question students differently. In a fourth grade classroom I’ve been working with, we’ve been investigating the question, “Am I understanding?” My conference today started with, “So, are you understanding?” The child nodded confidently. I asked him to tell me how he knew. He responded by saying that he could easily summarize what he had read, a strategy that we had talked about using when monitoring comprehension.

I continued our conversation by asking him to reflect on whether or not there were times when he knows he is NOT understanding. His reply? “Not in this book because it has short chapters but sometimes when I read books that have long chapters, I don’t always understand.”

Wow. I never would have got that had I stuck to the typical repertoire of comprehension questions. I was so glad I asked because now, he has got me thinking about how to support him when he reads longer texts. He also has me wondering if other children are facing the same struggle. This conversation made me take pause and consider where to take my comprehension monitoring instruction next.

Without this kind of talk, my teaching would be much less informed and consequently, less effective.

In his book What Really Matters for Struggling Readers Richard Allington writes, “Our schools create more students who can read than students who do read.” The problem of getting kids to read more is rampant. They just don’t seem to want to do it. The question is why?

A lot of teachers sheepishly confess to me on that sly that when they were young, they didn’t like to read either. They get it when kids say, “I don’t want to read!” In the spirit of coming clean, I too have a confession. I was one of you. I didn’t like to read as a kid, either.

Looking back, I can’t understand it. I grew up in Central New York, the land of lake effect snow. I can’t tell you how many hours I wiled away doing nothing but feeling bored. I could have filled a lot of hours reading books, but I go back to my original question: Why don’t kids want to read?

For me, I think a lot of the problem was book choice. Every time I’d go to the library and pick something out on my own, it was a long shot. It was a random grab at the shelves. I’d look at the cover and think, “this looks okay, I’ll give it a whirl.” I’d read a couple of pages, put it down, and never go back to it. Sound familiar?

I see this cycle a lot in the classrooms I visit. I predict with staggering certainty who will finish books and who will not. So, again I ask, why don’t they want to read? I think a lot of the problem is kids don’t know what to read. Earlier this year, I blogged about the importance of blessing books. I mentioned the titles we share often become coveted reading in the classroom. At first kids are interested because they like you and want to please you, but then, they read it and actually get turned on. When kids get turned on to something, they start telling other kids about what is happening. They start passing books around. Certain titles have waiting lists. It’s what happened with Harry Potter a few years ago, it’s what I see every day with Captain Underpants, The Magic Tree House, and The Diary of a Wimpy Kid. How do these crazes get started? People get excited and they talk.

We as teachers can learn so much from this. Talk. Therein lies the secret to getting kids to read more. I sometimes wonder how my reading life would have been different had my teachers spent time talking up books. What if they had allowed other kids to share what they were on about in their reading? Would it have made me a reader? Who knows? But I sure wish someone would have tried.

I recently read Peter Johnston’s book Choice Words. In it he quotes Margaret Donaldson from her book Children’s Minds, “the better you know something, the more risk there is of behaving egocentrically in relation to your knowledge. Thus, the greater the gap between teacher and learner, the harder teaching becomes.” I took notice of this because I had recently had a conversation with a group of teachers about this very topic. Over the years, we become very close to our teaching. We come to know and understand what we do really well because we’ve been doing a lot of years. This knowledge, for all intents and purposes, is an asset. However, we do sometimes begin to make assumptions about what children should know. I think this is the gap that Margaret Donaldson is talking about and it definitely does make teaching harder.

Today I was in a third grade reading workshop classroom having a conference with a boy reading a Pokemon book. I made the assumption that he probably knew a lot about Pokemon from watching the television show and figured I would support his comprehension by activating prior knowledge. Mistake one. He really knew very little about Pokemon and according to him, had caught only the end of a couple Diamond and Pearl episodes. Then I launched into my next assumption. He had some other reason for choosing this book and had thought about what to expect based on the title, cover illustration, and back cover. Mistake two. He had looked at the front cover and had some thoughts about what the book might be about but he hadn’t read the back cover. In fact, he was thinking he’d do that when he finished the book because after all, that is the very last page. Wow. That surprised me. I know that a lot of kids don’t read the back cover of books but it never occurred to me that a child would reason it would only make sense to do that at the end of the book because it is the very last page. This was the wake up call I needed to remind me to stop making assumptions. In order to be the most effective teachers we can be, we need to step into the shoes of the children that we teach .

It is reading workshop. The teacher reads aloud from a book and teaches a mini lesson about questioning as a comprehension monitoring strategy. After the lesson, the children head back to their seats. The teacher draws their attention to a chart that instructs them how they will use their time during the rest of the workshop. Quietly, children begin to move about the room. Some put on headphones and begin to listen to a story on tape. Others report to the classroom library to select new books. Some stay in their seats to read quietly from their independent selections while others write in their response journal. A small group reports to the computers and begins to work on an interactive program that has been selected for them. For nearly sixty minutes these children move from reading activity to reading activity without instruction or intervention from the teacher. For sixty full minutes, these children are engaged in reading and activities that support their growth as readers. It is quiet and productive.

I have heard teachers insist that such a scene is just a dream. Something that they merely WISH could happen in their classrooms. However, what I have just described is a REAL reading workshop in a SECOND grade classroom. Thank you, Patti, for inviting me into your classroom and reminding me of what really can happen when a reading workshop is nurtured and tended to with the “I think I can” and “I know I will” attitude. Wow.

As I got to thinking about reading and writing workshop, I realized it’s not a lot different from a marriage.

September is like an engagement. You’re filled with optimism. It’s a new class, a new year, a new beginning. Everybody is excited and can’t wait to get started.

October is the wedding. The big event arrives: Children’s book baggies are filled with just right books, their notebooks are decorated. You have officially launched their reading and writing lives. It is a beautiful affair.

November starts out with the honeymoon period. You’ve got your kids reading independently, working in guided reading groups, you’re trying out shared reading, they are writing in their writer’s notebooks every day. Workshop feels like a well oiled machine until…

… one day in the middle of November when it doesn’t. You suddenly realize there’s an English Language Arts assessment coming up in January and you’ve got to finish that unit on magnets in Science and there’s a project on Native Americans sitting on the back table, and don’t forget Math. There’s a test coming up on that in March. And what about parent teacher conferences and report cards? Oh, then there’s Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hannukah, and Kwaanza.

We all long to go back to “the way it used to be” when the going gets tough. When you find yourself wondering why you ever wanted to do reading and writing workshop in the first place, remember to ask yourself if the cookie cutter paragraphs about “What I am Thankful For” were really better than the poem Thomas wrote about his walk in the woods and the memoir Kayla wrote about the last time she saw her grandma? Was it better when the whole class read the same book and Margie, Karen, and Dylan sat in the back fiddling with their pencil because they couldn’t really read it? Or is it better that kids race to show you an expression that Amelia Bedelia would use in a book that wasn’t Amelia Bedelia?

Like a good marriage, reading and writing workshop take a lot of work. The struggle is part of the deal.

Using a red pen to correct papers has become something of an educational taboo. We don’t do it because we know that nothing deflates a learner more than a paper that comes back all marked up screaming at a child, “I can’t believe the mistakes you made!” We’ve all moved on to less severe colors and mind what we write on children’s papers so to keep children motivated to learn.

I recently had a reading conference with a young boy. It started innocently enough, “Tell me about what you are reading.” The child complied and shared his excitement about reading Diary of a Wimpy Kid. The day’s lesson was about fluency so I decided to ask him to read a short bit of his book to get a handle on what he did and did not already know about fluency. As he began to read, his voice was flat and unenthused. I worried. Does he understand this? So I directed him to notice a word that had been written in capital letters. I asked him if he knew why the author would do such a thing. He gave me a blank stare that clearly indicated he did not so I went on to explain how writers do that for emphasis. I told him that when writers want a reader to say it really loudly in their head, they use all capital letters. He accepted that explanation and dutifully went back and read it louder. He read on and came upon a couple of words that he did not know. We talked about strategies for decoding unfamiliar words. Again, I worried. Does he understand this? Our conference continued and this boy continued to disregard all he had learned about paying attention to punctuation cues and reading with expression. We addressed other words that came up that troubled him and by now, I could ignore the question burning in my brain no longer. DOES HE UNDERSTAND THIS? So I followed that line of thinking. “When you read this what do you see in your mind?” The young boy looked directly at the picture on the page and described the drawing the illustrator had made. There was no longer a question in my mind about whether this reader understood this book. So, I made yet another move. “You know, when readers aren’t understanding what they read, they have an important decision to make. They have to decide whether they will keep reading this book and try really hard to use their fix-up strategies to make sure they are understanding or they have to think about abandoning the book and going back to it after they have had more practice reading in books that are just-right for them.”

As it turned out, this young reader decided to abandon Diary of a Wimpy Kid for now. But after this conference, I am left wondering what he really learned. I tried to teach so many different things: why authors use capital letters in their writing, how to sound out words that you don’t know, how to pay attention to punctuation cues that tell you how to read it with expression, how do you know if you are understanding, AND when do readers abandon books. Yikes, talk about conference overload!

I liken this conference to the red pen marks on a paper. In the same way that red pen stops the learning because it says too much and deflates the learner’s confidence, so too does a conference that teaches too many things. In hindsight, I would have been better off to have made a note of my concern, stuck with fluency instruction, and revisited this reader again the next day. In the end, I think he would have learned more about becoming a better reader. Ultimately, that is what we want for all of our students.

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