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"This book is chock full of literacy wisdom that I myself would like to see schools embrace as they look for strategies that will boost student achievement in reading but also bolster students’ reading dispositions," says reviewer Cindi Rigsbee. "In classrooms like Miller’s, students are learning to love reading and to adopt literacy as a life-long habit."

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The Book Whisperer: Awakening the Inner Reader in Every Child
Donalyn Miller
2009 (240 pp./paperback)
Jossey-Bass
ISBN: 978-0-470-37227-2
$22.95

Reviewed by Cindi Rigsbee, NBCT

I was excited but a little nervous as I pulled the brown envelope holding Donalyn Miller’s book The Book Whisperer out of my mailbox. As a reading teacher, I have been familiar with Miller’s work for a couple of years, having read her Book Whisperer blog upon occasion. But my new role as book reviewer made me reach for that envelope with trepidation.

How could I possibly be unbiased? The book would contain commentary on my very life…would how I teach reading be questioned? Would I see myself on those pages and have my work affirmed, or would I feel threatened, my teaching techniques rejected by another teacher, half the country away?

But upon pulling the book from the unassuming envelope, I found myself wanting to whisper: “You had me at the cover…you had me at the cover.”

The cover represents all things good and beautiful – a clear blue sky, a princess dress, beach sand, and the focal point…an open book. Immediately I wanted to be that little girl standing on that shore in my princess dress, sun beaming on my face, wind lightly blowing the pages as I read. Yes, Donalyn Miller, you had me at the cover.

The Book Whisperer: Awakening the Inner Reader in Every Child was recently released by Jossey-Bass and can be seen advertised on numerous education sites and e-newsletters, with its pretty blue cover beckoning to teachers across the country. And well it should, as this book is chock full of literacy wisdom that I myself would like to see schools embrace as they look for strategies that will boost student achievement in reading but also bolster students’ reading dispositions. In classrooms like Miller’s, students are learning to love reading and to adopt literacy as a life-long habit.

I did find my practice validated as I turned the pages of The Book Whisperer. Ms. Miller and I have similar ideas about what a classroom should look like and feel like when it comes to reading. I, too, have studied the works of Atwell and Fountas & Pinnell and agree that one classroom plus one book times six weeks and a pile of comprehension worksheets is not the way to go. Miller does an exceptional job of describing the logistics of her classroom, which most likely looks different from what many would picture. 

Teachers in my own school have asked, “But how can my students all be reading different books at the same time?” The Book Whisperer explains in detail not only how this type of classroom can happen but also how students learn to love reading and even perform better on those pesky standardized tests as a result (not one of Miller’s students has failed her state’s reading assessment in four years!).

The Book Whisperer, ironically, spoke to me loudly. For example, I was highlighting early into the book and this quote on page 18 struck me as something that should be on a poster:

Ms. Miller does the job of changing children’s lives through reading in her classroom. She tells them that “reading is a university course in life,” and then she enrolls them in that course and leads them to be successful in it, day by day.

There were many times during the reading of this book that I nodded in agreement (Round Robin and Popcorn reading do not work!), and there were times when I cheered out loud (Miller called Accelerated Reader “the worst distortion of reading I can think of.”) There were other times when I questioned my own teaching. Miller’s desire for teachers to think about the cute activities that we’re so proud of, activities that have little literary merit, made me squirm as I thought of the Life Saver airplanes my students make when we read about the Wright Brothers.

And there were times when I wished that Ms. Miller was sitting right with me, and we were just two reading teachers having a conversation, because I did find myself questioning some things as I read. My classroom is full of what Miller calls “Developing Readers” (they’re called remedial in my school) – and I feel that the example of Kelsey whose mother reads “to her and with her” doesn’t fall in line with my student Devon who refuses to read and instead draws pictures of his brother’s tombstone in class. (He doesn’t have a mother reading to him.)

And Devon, like most of my students, but unlike Miller’s, gives me one-word answers to questions on my reading survey (an answer to “What kind of books do you like to read?” would elicit “None” from a student like Devon.) I have my own tricks that I use with Devon, of course, but I would love to know more about what Ms. Miller does in her classroom to motivate students who could be defined in a category even lower than her “Developing Readers.”

And although Miller does a good job of describing her “vast library,” I still can hear the pushback from classroom teachers who will say, “I don’t have thousands of books, and I can’t afford to buy them. What can I do?”

These are questions I hope to ask Donalyn Miller someday, as we pursue the teacher-to-teacher conversation that started as I read The Book Whisperer. I found Ms. Miller to be a flexible (so what if her students don’t read all 40 books as required?) and knowledgeable educator (she knows the research that literacy scholars have conducted and she understands the results of the “action research” from her own classroom).

And like all good books, The Book Whisperer leaves the reader wanting more. I’ll wait patiently for the sequel while I re-read Whisperer during my school’s Book Study (I’ll be sharing her idea with my principal immediately).

Thank you, Donalyn, for showing us what literacy instruction can and should be. My hope is that The Book Whisperer will change the teaching of reading, even if one classroom at a time, and that every teacher who sees this book will be invited in, as I was, by the very cover.

Cindi Rigsbee is a literacy teacher/coach at Gravelly Hill Middle School in Durham NC. She blogs at The Dream Teacher and was a finalist for 2009 National Teacher of the Year.

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David Perkins describes a sound wholistic approach to teaching and learning, but his book fails to make the leap from theory to practical application that could help busy teachers begin to transform their practice. "This book offers little practical advice that might help instructors who resist leaving their safe academic curricula to make the uncomfortable leap to teaching the whole game," says reviewer Mary Tedrow. "Little is provided to bridge that gap through visualization or application of his theories. No helping hand is offered to teachers who struggle against a tide of mandates that encourage ever more elementitis, grasping for any means to offer substantive learning experiences for their students."

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Making Learning Whole: How Seven Principles of Teaching Can Transform Education
David Perkins
2008 (272 pp/hardcover)
Jossey-Bass
ISBN: 978-0-470-38452-7
$24.95

Reviewed by Mary Tedrow, NBCT
High School English & Journalism
Northern Virginia

Disclaimer: I read (incrementally) the entire text of Making Learning Whole: How Seven Principles of Teaching Can Transform Education while sitting in front of my 11th-grade students in Reading Workshop, second block of the day. When I read under those circumstances, I find my mind runs on three tracks: A focus on the reading; a jump to what my students will need from me in the next 25 minutes; and, for professional titles like this book, a jump to how what I am reading will affect this particular classroom.

In this particular reading experience, I did not focus very well. I offer this confession because it led me to believe that, as a classroom teacher, I was not the audience David Perkins was looking for. Otherwise, my brain would have been firing more on the third track: making direct application to my classroom work.

That rarely happened.

Making Learning Whole is Perkins’ argument that education is damaged by breaking knowledge down into discrete parts, which he calls elementitis, a phenomenon that leaves students spitting out fractured facts that have little cohesiveness or application to the subject under study.

He advocates designing course instruction around a “junior version” of the ultimate goals in a course so students can learn the subject as a whole concept -- and then returning to aspects of the “game” that prove difficult to master. Perkins calls this working on the hard parts.

His ongoing analogy refers to how he and so many others learned baseball – first in the junior version of Little League. The complexities of the game are revealed over time and the hard parts are the skill drills any athlete will remember from their days of training.

He continues the baseball analogy through seven chapters that present each of his seven principles (my take on each chapter is in parentheses): Play the Whole Game (reduce elementitis); Make the Game Worth Playing (motivation); Work on the Hard Parts (practice, practice, practice); Play Out of Town (show that knowledge transfers); Uncover the Hidden Game (explore the underpinning structure of a subject; in the case of baseball it is the strategies that lead to winning); Learn from the Team (learning as a social rather than individual activity); Learn the Game of Learning (the old chestnut of growing lifelong-learners).

I agree with Dr. Perkins. I think John Dewey would also agree. I think most vocational teachers, or Yearbook, Art or Music teachers – or any number of others who have been lucky enough to teach a course like the Journalism course I taught for years – would agree. We have all worked with students in a junior version of grown-up games and seen the power it has on student achievement. Students learn through the process of doing over and over, working on the hard parts, uncovering – as Perkins would say – the hidden game concealed within the grown-up games.

I think where I’d quibble with Perkins is over his subtitle: How Seven Principles of Teaching can Transform Education. This book offers little practical advice that might help instructors who resist leaving their safe academic curricula to make the uncomfortable leap to teaching the whole game. Little is provided to bridge that gap through visualization or application of his theories. No helping hand is offered to teachers who struggle against a tide of mandates that encourage ever more elementitis, grasping for any means to offer substantive learning experiences for their students.

After explaining his take on what I read as constructivism, Perkins offers a one-pager at the end of each of his seven principle chapters titled “Wonders of Learning.” All of the five or six paragraphs at the end of each chapter begin with “I wonder” as in “I wonder how to develop a good theory of difficulty for what I’m teaching?” Questions, I assume, designed to set readers on the course to transformation.

Frankly, I wondered when I’d have the time to re-think my entire theory of teaching while most of my waking hours are consumed by mandated state tests, data collection, grade reports, increasing student enrollment, committee meetings, grading and responding to student work. I need a little more help to go through my transformation. I suspect those who don’t spend leisurely hours in a think tank environment might as well. The theory is great, but without more step by step assistance, Perkins’ ideas are unlikely to revolutionize the practice of teachers too busy to look beyond next week’s plans.

As I thumb back through this book, I don’t see the usual evidence of my high engagement with a professional title – the highlighting, post-it notes and scribbled plans in the margin. On a couple occasions, however, what Perkins said did lead me into thoughts about my own students and their next 25 minutes.

I like the graphic on page 104. It shows three ways to respond to student confusion. It might be helpful for reaching those teachers who are stuck in “blame the student” mode. I also made note of questions he offered to get students thinking. The ones I wrote down: What’s going on here? What makes you say that? and What makes this hard? I’m always looking for good inquiry questions.

The sports analogy works, the theory is acceptable. But in all honesty, David Perkins did not offer enough to overcome my distraction, and I won’t be recommending this book to my teaching peers. I suspect it will be required reading in his Harvard Graduate School of Education courses.

Mary Tedrow teaches high school English and journalism and co-directs the Northern Virginia Writing Project. She is a National Board Certified Teacher and a former Fellow of the Teacher Leaders Network.

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The element is the point at which natural talent meets personal passion. When people arrive at the element, they feel most themselves and most inspired and achieve at their highest levels. The Element draws on the stories of a wide range of people, from ex-Beatle Paul McCartney to Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons.. and others, including business leaders and athletes. It explores the components of this new paradigm: The diversity of intelligence, the power of imagination and creativity, and the importance of commitment to our own capabilities. In his review, National Board Certified preschool teacher and professional painter John M. Holland focuses on Robison's ideas about "luck" and his observation that schools must shift from "how smart are you" to "how are you smart?"

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The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything
Ken Robinson with Lou Aronica
2009 (288 pp; hardcover)
Viking Press
ISBN: 9780670020478
$25.95

Reviewed by John M. Holland, NBCT
Pre-School Teacher
Richmond (VA) City Schools

My son has a lucky dinosaur. He keeps it in his sock drawer and pulls it out when we play board games. His mother says that when she found it she "knew it was his lucky dinosaur." We have started to move him towards considering that maybe HE is lucky. I think he is starting to believe us.

I hope he starts to internalize this idea because it may help him find his bliss. I say this because being "lucky" is one of those ephemeral traits that seem to surround successful people. I just finished reading The Element by Sir Kenneth Robinson and turns out that being "lucky" is one of the traits that can help you find and inhabit your "element." Luck is the ability to be open to opportunities, to act on opportunities, and to turn misfortune into opportunity.

When we start to describe luck this way it becomes much less about superstition and much more of a creative skill. It is this type of thinking that Sir Ken Robinson is known for exploring.

Reading The Element is like reading a transcript of the conversation between your heart, your head, and your education. Only this time, your heart wins the argument. Ken Robinson tells us all the things that we told ourselves before we were "tracked" or Myers-Briggs'ed into groups for easier classification. This time though, your heart has some heavy-duty research behind its case.

 In The Element, Robinson argues that schooling, as a system, is like a machine that dehumanizes kids by trying to stuff them into boxes instead of helping them to find their potential as human beings. He says schooling is all about society and not about the kids. Through stories of many exceptional people, Robinson describes what might have happened if famous and successful people had listened to their parents, or their teachers, or their Myers-Briggs for that matter.

If so-and-so had listened to the teacher who said, "You’re good at ____ so you should become a ____," they never would have become the creator of The Simpsons or the author of The Alchemist or the winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize for Economics. The key is that these individuals discovered their true passion, realized their aptitude, and stuck to it, sometimes in the face of their education and in spite of a community or a society that didn't buy it.

The trouble with schooling, according to The Element, is that schools do not ask the right questions. Schools today are built on the question, "How smart are you?" Robinson says we should be asking, "How are you smart?"

If schools were organized around identifying and supporting students' finding their "element," teaching and learning would look much different than it does now. "The Element is the meeting point of natural aptitude and personal passion," he concludes.

I have to say I can relate to this book. There is this feeling I get when I am painting and sometimes when I am teaching. Actually, it is not so much a feeling as place I feel like I inhabit. This feeling of being in flow. It seems to be a state that almost all people are able to reach. But in society there is a meta-story that seems false to me about what creativity is and means. Many times creativity is seen as a gift from a higher power, something out of the ordinary.

In Robinson's view, creativity is what happens when aptitude and passion find each other. It is what students will need to tap into in order to be successful in the unknown future. Robinson says "it would be wise" to support students in identifying and pursuing their element, rather than a particular career or a set of marketable skills, because the only thing we can be sure of is that the future will be different than the world we live in today.

John M. Holland teaches in the Head Start program of the Richmond VA public schools. He is a National Board Certified Teacher in early childhood education and blogs at Lead from the Start and Inside PreK. Images of many of his paintings can be seen at Much Too Bright.
 

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Building from the statistics and anecdotal evidence of disengaged students, authors Joseph DiMartino, President of the Center for Secondary School Redesign, and John Clarke, a creator of professional development schools with 42 years of practical experience in classrooms, have assembled a guide to creating student-centered high schools. “It all sounds great,” says reviewer Mary Tedrow. “But coming from a teacher’s perspective, I cannot imagine this book being useful until it is in the hands of open-minded, inspired leadership. I’m not convinced that we have enough of those yet in place to make a nationwide difference.”

Full Text:

Personalizing the High School Experience for Each Student
By Joseph DiMartino and John H. Clarke
2008 (200 pp./paperback)
Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development
ISBN: 978-1-4166-0647-5
$27.95 ($21.95 for members)

Reviewed by Mary Tedrow, NBCT
High School English
Winchester, VA
Co-Director, Northern Virginia Writing Project

Across this nation, 30 percent of ninth graders do not graduate with their class. If nothing else proves that the current configuration of high schools is failing students, that one statistic should. Not convincing enough for you? Here’s another: the United States ranks 16th in the world for high school completion rates.

For those who labor within these high school buildings, these are not surprising numbers. For the general public, they might come as a shock. Formerly a teacher of ninth graders, I saw first-hand evidence that we lose our high school freshmen at a steady pace – one that is not reflected in our graduation rates, generally published at above the 90% level. Some inventive statistics regularly put a happier face on student attrition.

Building from the statistics and anecdotal evidence of disengaged students, authors Joseph DiMartino, President of the Center for Secondary School Redesign, and John Clarke, a creator of professional development schools with 42 years of practical experience in classrooms, have assembled a guide to creating student-centered high schools.

Their thin book of only seven chapters provides an outline for building a school responsive to student needs in the context of a particular community. The authors are right in offering just an outline, since these schools are envisioned as a vital part of the community they dwell within. Students are encouraged to interact with -- rather than be sequestered from -- the surrounding world in order to achieve self-identified goals.

Each chapter of Personalizing the High School Experience for Each Student covers one of the hallmarks of already successful student-centered schools and provides the sample rubrics, evaluation sheets, and reflective questioning necessary in the project-driven work that the students are engaged in when a school shifts to a student-centered philosophy.

The authors also have suggestions for re-managing time, currently dominated by a now-defunct (according to the authors) Carnegie unit system that limits high school flexibility. The samples and suggestions come from high schools that have already made a difference in the success rates of their students – proof that starting with children and engaging them in a vision for their own life is the key to saving our public high schools.

At the end of each chapter, the authors outline the stumbling blocks that any school should anticipate as they implement this new configuration. It all sounds great. But coming from a teacher’s perspective, I cannot imagine this book being useful until it is in the hands of open-minded, inspired leadership. I’m not convinced that we have enough of those yet in place to make a nationwide difference.

Why we don’t have this now

There are a few places where I think the authors glossed over the true stumbling block to student-centered high school education: the need to re-define a teacher’s role. If that shifting role isn’t supported by continual professional development and a reconsideration of how a teacher’s time is to be used, this plan will just go on the already overflowing rubbish bin of initiatives tried and failed.

Don’t get me wrong. DiMartino and Clarke were singing to the choir when this book landed in my lap. Student-centered instruction works. I’ve seen it happen time and time again. And, even better, igniting students through inquiry-based instruction is fun for both the teacher and the student. (And for that reason alone, some educators dismiss it. School, apparently, shouldn’t be fun.)

Re-centering high schools on student work, student questions, and student-generated goals should happen tomorrow, or better still today, as far as I am concerned. What I don’t trust are school administrators who have historically taken a new idea and ruined it by making it just another add-on to an already overwhelming workload on the part of teachers.

Re-thinking high schools is a philosophic sea-change in the way some educators view school. If time is not taken to help the school’s leadership and its teachers digest, internalize, and personalize the idea for themselves, it is doomed to failure.

In addition, creating student-centered schools is an idea that must be extended into pre-service teacher preparation. Student-centered classrooms and schools move teachers into the role of coach or adviser to students, a role not uniformly accepted by all teachers or administrators nor promoted in all teacher education institutions. There are many who came to teach in high school because of their love for their subject but not for their students. They covet the role of the sage on the stage. And there are many administrators who see that role as appropriate – who do not recognize the role of teacher-as-coach as a valid one.

Nor do nearly enough administrators see teaching as a collaborative act. The authors mention this several times but not nearly in strong enough terms. In fact, I had to read over one passage three times before I could make solid sense of one of their points. Their message was this: In industrialized countries where student success is high, teachers spend considerably more time outside of the classroom planning with peers than American teachers do. This is an important message about teacher time that was buried in a complicated passage.

Currently, my impression is that administrators do not feel teachers are working unless they are standing in front of students. The important work of planning strong, engaging lessons is considered fluff, if you gauge its value by how teacher time is now used at the building level.

I’ve lived through the switch to block scheduling and seen how this great idea has been misinterpreted. The original move to the block was intended so that 90 minutes would ensure time for adults to mentor students and to offer more engaging hands-on lessons. These lessons could be carefully planned in the additional planning time the new schedule would make possible.

Once administrators saw that teachers would have more time away from students they immediately began using the time to address administrative duties. In my building teachers are required to monitor hallways and bathrooms during planning. No time is scheduled during the day for teams to work together designing the innovative lessons they should be able to present in the longer teaching time. No professional development was offered to help veterans reconfigure their lessons for student engagement beyond the traditional lecture. What we got in the end was the bare minimum: a longer class period.

The ideas and action steps offered in Personalizing the High School Experience depend upon collaborative planning and intensive time working with students in advisories. Those initiatives will have to be seen as part of a teacher’s workday by all concerned parties, including, and most importantly, those who control that workday. 

Though the authors offer the tools for rebuilding high schools, this is not the book to inspire the leadership to change philosophy and do what is right for students and teachers. That book may have already been written by George Wood in Time to Learn where he expresses the goals and successes of Federal Hocking High School in Ohio.

This book is for those school leaders who have already been converted, who see that teacher time can we well used for mentoring and coaching students during the school day, who believe we must enable students to be masters of their own learning rather than prisoners in a closed system.

Those leaders (may they flourish) will find this book to be a helpful guide for planning and structuring a high school where every student feels known, welcome, and successful.

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Debbie Diller has created an “incredible new resource” with her new book Spaces & Places, says reviewer Gail Ritchie, a K-6 school-based instructional coach. Using before-and-after photos and simple step-by-step instructions, Diller helps teachers de-clutter and organize classroom spaces in which every inch is being utilized thoughtfully. The goal is to create a purposeful, inviting literacy-rich classroom in just about any circumstances.

Full Text:

Spaces & Places: Designing Classrooms for Literacy
Debbie Diller
2008 (240 pp./softcover)
Stenhouse Publishers
ISBN: 978-1-57110-722-0
$28.50

Reviewed by Gail V. Ritchie, NBCT, PhD
School-based Curriculum Leader
Fairfax County, Virginia

I have found an incredible new resource for my work as an Instructional Coach for grades K-6. Spaces & Places by Debbie Diller has created a visual companion to her ground-breaking books, Literacy Work Stations and Practice with Purpose. Using before-and-after photos and simple step-by-step instructions, Diller helps all of us de-clutter and organize classroom spaces in which “every inch is being utilized thoughtfully” (p.1).

Emphasizing the connection between the classroom space and student behavior, Diller helps teachers restructure their classrooms by considering such things as:

•    What to keep and what to get rid of (her motto: “When in doubt, throw it out” (p. 168),
•    Accessible materials,
•    Placement and provisioning of work stations,
•    Encouraging student independence,
•    Involving students in decision-making so that they feel like they’re part of the learning,
•    Traffic patterns,
•    Furniture arrangement and down-sizing the amount of furniture,
•    Double-duty use of furniture, and
•    Packing up at the end of the year.

The book is organized into five chapters and a resource section. Each chapter has a step-by-step process to follow and numerous photographs of what a purposeful, inviting literacy-rich classroom can look like. The photos are from many different settings, including open classrooms and portable classrooms. The resource section includes a “Where to Find It” section, providing information about where the space-saving organizers and materials can be purchased. It also includes planning forms, checklists, and ideas for professional development with a book study of Spaces & Places.

Chapter 1 focuses on the importance of planning your space before school begins. This involves four steps:

1.    Think about the teaching you plan to do within the space.
2.    Think about what your ideal classroom would look like.
3.    Assess your space for #1 and #2.
4.    Make a map of the classroom arrangement that will allow you to do #1 and #2.

Chapter 2 focuses on actually arranging the classroom in a way that saves time and maximizes space. The steps involved here are:

1.    Set up the whole group area and “big stuff.”
2.    Set up the small group teaching area(s).
3.    Set up the classroom library.
4.    Set up the Word Wall.
5.    Set up work stations around the perimeter of the room.
6.    Set up the computer area.
7.    Set up student desks/tables.
8.    Set up the teacher desk (if you absolutely must have one) last.

Chapter 3 focuses on arranging the stations that are essential for the kind of classroom advocated in Literacy Work Stations and Practice with Purpose. For each station, there are three questions you should ask yourself:

1.    What is the purpose of this space?
2.    How does it link to instruction?
3.    What materials will we need here?

Chapter 4 focuses on what should be displayed on your classroom walls, and what to do about displays if you don’t have walls. The steps are:

1.    Think about the message you want to convey. What you display shows what you value.
2.    Plan which space(s) you’ll use for what purpose.
3.    Plan display spaces.
4.    Create the spaces as you teach the material, leaving room for student work and minimizing “teacher store” commercially-produced materials.
5.    Change the displays as the year goes on to reflect what you and your students have learned and are focusing on.

Chapter 5 provides numerous helpful hints for organizing your teaching materials for end-of-year pack-up and/or moving to a new classroom space. Diller reminds teachers to keep teaching up until the very last day. On the last day of school, invite students to help you take things down and put them away. After students depart, empty one space at a time, packing the materials in clearly labeled boxes/bins/crates. Before packing anything, ask yourself, “Should I keep this?” For teachers who are moving to a new classroom, Diller recommends:

1.    Make a plan.
2.    Take photos of the spaces you like and want to recreate.
3.    Gather storage materials.
4.    Put photos and labels on each box.
5.    On the last day of school, invite students to help you take things down and put them in the labeled boxes.
6.    Pack, place materials by the door, ready to be moved to your new location.

And that’s all there is to it! Spaces and Places is a quick read that teachers can use as a guidepost before school starts so that they can begin the year with an inviting and purposeful classroom space. Then during the year, when clutter starts to build up, one glance inside Diller’s book will motivate and inspire teachers to once again strive to make their rooms look like the “after” photos, and the step-by-step procedures will provide the easy-to-follow guidelines for doing just that.
 

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