"Creating a Classroom Where Readers Flourish" - Donalyn Miller

http://journals.ohiolink.edu.proxy.lib.ohio-state.edu/ejc/pdf.cgi/Miller_Donalyn.pdf?issn=00340561&issue=v66i0002&article=88_cacwrf

I chose this article from "The Reading Teacher" because the title sounded interesting and after reading the abstract, I wanted to know more. In class, we talk about creating a literacy environment for our students, and this article seemed to have a similar topic. Although we have studied many ways to create this environment for reading, I wanted to hear a perspective from a teacher in the classroom recently. After reading this article, the two major concepts that Donalyn Miller focuses on are making time for reading and the opportunity to choose what to read.

Miller starts out the article by showing us how all of her students were asking her questions concerning the books that they were reading. It was intriguing to see how many of her students were reading on their own time, and it made m
e want to know her secret. After her introduction, she states a fact that we have well-learned during this course: the amount of time that a student reads is directly related to the student's success. This means that the more a student reads, the better they will be at not only reading, but all of their studies. This also means that the weakest readers who do not read as much will only continue to fall behind. "The achievement gap between our strongest readers and our weakest readers grows wider each passing year" states Miller. This is when she provides her suggestions of time and choice to improve readers.

Miller strongly believes that making time for students to read is very important for them to become good readers. The more a student reads, the better they will be at reading. This is known as the "Matthew Effect", found in chapter 5 of Graves and is described as "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer" only applied to reading. To make sure that this gap does not occur, she sets aside time in her classroom each day for all of her students to read. She calls silent reading time a "luxury" for most teachers because they typically do not have time to spare for reading when standardized tests require so much preparation these days. Miller understands this but feels that it is so important that she still manages to find time for it. She also suggests that students carry books around with them wherever they go in case they have some free time. I love this idea and actually do this too. Instead of waiting for something and wasting time, she says that having a book with you gets rid of that boredom. In my opinion, younger students are not going to pick up this habit immediately, but over time, hopefully they will start to see the use. Any time spent reading is time spent improving, and Miller encourages her students to read whenever they can.

Another element of creating a classroom full of readers is choice. Miller explains that this is the key way to motivating students. When students have the opportunity to choose what they read, they will have more incentive to actually read it. After discussions with her students, Miller decides to no longer have whole-class novel units because
there is no motivation and excitement about the book the class reads. It is hard to find a book that engages the large range of interests and reading abilities of students in the class. It also decreases motivation to be forced to read a book. "Learners who lack input in decision making feel powerless and demotivated--this is true for adults, for teachers, and for our students." This is why Miller lets students make their own decision about what book they want to read. She ensures that they are still learning the skills and knowledge they should be for their level, but incorporates choice which motivates the students to want to read. Miller also gave brief book talks or used sections of books for lessons to give students a taste of different books out there. This helped the students find books they were interested in and feel confident that they were not only making their own choice of book, but a good choice that would fit them.

This article relates to our course in  many ways. It relates to chapter 3 "Motivation and Engagement" because both mention creating an environment that encourages reading and making choice a big aspect of motivation. It also relates to chapter 5 "Differentiation Instruction and Intervention" and the concept of the "Matthew Effect." This article is connected to chapter 8 "Fluency" because it focuses on wide reading in different texts to promote motivation. Lastly, it connects to chapter 12 "Encouraging Independent Reading and Reader Response" because it suggests providing more time to simply just read to improve a student's skills in reading.

Although I am not teaching reading in the future, a few good ideas from this article can be applied to any kind of subject. The more one does a task, they better they will become at it. I will use this in my future classroom. When students practice something more and more, they will only excel in it. For example, I may have students do flashcards during classroom time. The more they practice math, the better they will become. Another good concept from this article was the idea of student choice. In my future classroom, I want to let students have a say in what to do. For example, if we are doing a project, maybe I will have a few different options of appropriate things to turn in. These basic ideas of repetition and choice can be applied in any type classroom.

The Power of Introverts - Susan Cain

When I first started to watch this TED Talk, I couldn't help but agree with everything Susan Cain said. Reading is considered an introvert activity and is one of my favorite things to do as well, so I already started to relate myself to her. Then as she began to describe how she grew up, trying to prove that she was "bold and assertive" by going to crowded bars when she really just wanted to have a quiet dinner with friends, I almost felt like she was describing my life. Although I like to go out and explore interesting places, I would much rather stay in and have a relaxing night with a few close friends. I've never really considered myself an extreme introvert, but I've always known I'm not an extrovert.

I chose this talk because I wanted to see a comparison between introverts and extroverts, and the title "The Power of Introverts" intrigued me. I know that I am more of an introvert than an extrovert, so I wanted to see what my "power" was. I also wanted to understand how this comparison of two different  types of personalities could be applied to students in the classroom.

Cain gives an interesting talk focused on introverts in the world today. She said something in the beginning that really stood out to me: "Shyness is not introversion. Shyness is the fear of social judgment. Introversion is how some people respond to stimulation, including social stimulation." This stands out to me because I think that many people do not know the difference. These definitions can be beneficial to teachers. Instead of thinking a student is shy because they aren't raising their hand, it could be that they are just an introvert and don't feel the need to share their thoughts aloud. Many times teachers assume that students who don't participate in front of the class are not understanding the information. Although this is sometimes true, it is usually not the case. Some students simply just don't feel like sharing their thoughts in public. I know this because I tend to be this student in a crowded classroom. These introverted students are having a rough time in classrooms today because education systems are trying to gear learning towards more extroverted styles. They believe that extroversion is better for all students and that they can learn more, which is not necessarily true for school systems today.

I see this practice of trying to use a more extroverted style of learning in my classes this year. My physics lab is strictly group work with a bare minimum of individual work. Although this is an interesting style of learning and is beneficial at some times, every day of class is only focused on group work. Even quizzes are worked on together as a group. The individual time comes in when we complete our own test/quizzes, having to explain everything in our own words. And even though this seems individual, we discuss the answers within our group before we write, so everyone ends up having similar answers anyway.

Although I enjoy this way of learning and it is a nice change of pace from the typical lecture format, working in a group has its pros and cons. I love being able to have discussions with my group and bounce ideas off one another. Two (or multiple) heads are better than one, so we can usually figure out an answer to a question better together rather than by ourselves. On the other hand, solitude is important as well. Cain states that "Solitude is a crucial ingredient to creativity." She also makes the point that when in a group of people, we tend to mimic each other's opinions, especially the most dominant person in the group. I see this frequently in my physics group, so I can't help but to agree. I enjoy working in this group, but sometimes a little solitude would be helpful as well, especially when forming your own opinions about experiments.

Jumping ahead to the future, I plan on keeping these ideas in mind when teaching. This TED talk relates to the course content of Reading Foundations because it gives teachers ideas of how different readers/students may be acting in the classroom and how to teach to everyone's needs. It may help teachers come up with other ways to give introverted students a chance to participate, such as writing in a journal. Group work is a great way of learning. Students have an opportunity to share their opinions in a more comfortable, smaller group setting than in front of the entire class. This could truly allow for some great ideas, creativity, and discussion! But we as teachers also need to keep in mind that group work isn't best for all students, and that some prefer to work alone. This allows us to accommodate all of our students.

Running Records

Although I cannot remember actually participating in running records as a younger student, I do remember seeing a second grade teacher that I would tutor for having her students do them. At first I didn't understand what the point was and how students reading a book aloud could give the teacher valuable information about their reading processes. I couldn't see what the teacher would find useful in this test other than how many errors the student makes. I used to think that many factors could change how the student reads the book, like if a student gets nervous reading aloud, how difficult the book is, how many people the student is reading in front of, etc. Reading the article on running records cleared up these misconceptions. I now understand how complex running records are, the best situations to complete running records with students, and some basis on how to interpret them to benefit the teacher's work with the students.

The main sentence that made me understand the text was, "The prime purpose of a Running Record is to understand more about how children are using what they know to get to the messages of the text, or in other words what reading processes they are using." I think this is demonstrated throughout the article and is made clear through the different examples. The way a student is reading the text aloud shows how the student is figuring out what the words are, interpreting the meaning, and how fast the student can read. I particularly liked the examples on page 5 contrasting Peter and John's running records with the same text. One can really see the difference of how students process what they are reading. If a student was sounding out a word versus coming up with a word that makes sense with the rest of the sentence, these are obvious clues about the student's thinking processes when reading.

In general, I think that running records can be very useful, especially to elementary teachers who focus on the reading process. The process that these teachers go through is very complex and detailed, but I am up to the challenge of trying to complete my own running record for a student. I think the most difficult tasks are going to be interpreting the running record, creating the analysis, and understanding how the student reads based off of the errors. It should be an interesting few weeks with running records!

Teaching English Language Learners

Taking Spanish class throughout high school and college, I felt that I have learned a lot of material and could decently speak in Spanish during that time period. Now that I haven't taken Spanish for over a year, I'm not sure I would be able to communicate as well. For me, I have to be actively engaged in a language to understand it and use it more. During high school when I had Spanish class everyday, our teacher only allowed us to speak Spanish while in her classroom. If she caught you using English to say something, points were deducted off your grade. I thought that speaking Spanish all the time would be easy, but it proved to be extremely difficult to communicate my thoughts sometimes. I found out that I didn't know the translation for some basic, everyday words that I used in English and had to describe that word in Spanish in order to explain it. I imagine this is how English Language Learners (ELL) feel on a daily basis.

Even though I can somewhat relate to how the ELL students must feel, my situation is completely different since every student in my Spanish class was in the same situation. No student was any better in Spanish than the other students. ELL students are in a classroom where students have English as their native language, so everyone is not on the same level. I imagine this must be very difficult for the ELL students and their teachers. If I run into this situation in the future, I will look into the ideas in this section that were beneficial for helping these students.

I liked the idea of using examples of things from the ELL student's culture. When a student can relate to something, they feel more comfortable and are more willing to participate. Creating a sense of family in the classroom goes along with this idea. When a student feels welcomed and cared for in a classroom, they automatically feel more comfortable in their surroundings. Since this environment is already intimidating and scary for ELL students, a welcoming environment is very important to their learning. The last point I truly liked was empowering the students. Giving them the idea that they can work through this challenge and you are enthusiastic to help them do it is powerful. Sometimes students just need the support from their teacher to know that they can succeed.

Chopsticks

After sitting down and "reading" this book, I can honestly say that it was one of, if not the most interesting, styles of a book I have ever seen. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this creative novel which I kind of consider a work of art. The way the authors tell the story is so fascinating to me. Even though a book told through pictures may seem confusing to someone, I had almost no trouble understanding what was going on throughout the book. There were some words to help the reader get the gist of what the story was about, but hardly any other words besides that. It is so crazy that I could understand what was going on merely by looking at pictures. I think a big part of the interpretation of the pictures was the pages before and after a single page. I would interpret a page by making as many connections as I could to previous information I had learned throughout the book so far. Then I would relate that information to what happened on the page before it, in order to complete the sequence of events. I feel that this type of book would be helpful to teaching children what it means to use context clues and have them explain their thoughts when interpreting something.

I thought that one of the best parts of "Chopsticks" was the storyline. It was so different than anything I have read before and it made the book that much more appealing to me. I loved that it dealt with the arts, music, family, and a young love story. The way the book told the story of the two people was beautiful. The pictures were artistic and natural. I especially loved the recurring images/themes throughout the book, for example the mix tapes, dandelions, the song "Chopsticks", Jo Ann Castle, and certain images. There was also the repetitive aspect of  the ways of telling the story such as the postcards, letters, instant messaging, report cards, and notes. I feel that these repetitive ideas helped the reader make connections with previous information in order to understand what was happening.

My favorite part was the detail and quality of the pictures. I enjoy photography and interesting art, so this book was very fun for me to look at. The pictures and writing were so creative and it really entertained me. I could picture and understand what was going on due to the depth and focus of these images. I loved the way the book was put together.

My Literary Autobiography!

Literary History

Comparing my school and home experiences with reading, I would say that they are completely different. The main difference is choice. This is probably why I feel that my school experiences with reading were mostly negative. The books that I clearly remember disliking were the ones we were forced to read throughout middle and high school. Being the age I was, most of the books we read were boring and had absolutely no relation to my life. We read books like "To Kill a Mockingbird," "The Great Gatsby," and "Native Son." I had trouble understanding these books and could not appreciate them. At the age I am at now, I would really love to go back and read these books to get a new experience with them. By doing this, I feel that I would get a deeper understanding of them and a whole new appreciation. My school experiences with reading were mostly negative (with a few exceptions) due to the fact that we were forced to read books that I found no personal connection to.



My home experiences with reading are my favorite part of my literary history! My experiences here were so positive and enjoyable. As a child, my mom would read my siblings and I books all the time. I loved reading stories. On Saturday mornings, I would take all of my stuffed animals and put them in a big circle on my parents' bed and read books to them, pretending that they were my class. When I was an emergent reader, I read books and was read to frequently. As I grew up, my home experience continued to be positive, and I grew to love reading books all the time, especially series books. I loved that I already knew the characters and could easily tell what was happening in the story. When I read books that were interesting to me and ones that I could relate to, I enjoyed them so much more. This also caused me to write all the time. I wrote stories whenever I could, having a lot of notebooks in my room. In the fifth grade, an author came to our school and I actually asked her if she could help me publish one of my books. Needless to say, my home experiences with reading were so positive that I loved to read and write all the time, considering them hobbies of mine. This probably had a lot to do with the fact that I could choose any book to read or any idea to write about. I was not being forced to do anything, I made the choice of what I wanted to read.


My favorite books as a child were "Goodnight Moon," "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie," "Go Dog Go," and "Barnyard Dance." As I mentioned above, I loved reading series books. In elementary school I read the "Magic Treehouse" series. In middle school I read "A Series of Unfortunate Events" and "The A-list" series. In high school I read the "Gossip Girl" series, "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants" series, and the "Twilight" series. I loved reading books that were interesting to me and could relate to my life.

 Current Literary Attitudes and Interests

 I currently enjoy reading for the most part. It truly just depends on what I am reading. In my spare time, I like to relax. Sometimes I consider reading relaxing, so I would find this enjoyable. One big factor has to do with choice. As I mentioned before, If I am being forced to read something uninteresting, I have less motivation to do it. I do see myself as a reader because I truly enjoy the concept of reading and absolutely love getting lost in a good book. However, at this time in my life when I have a lot of boring textbooks to read for my classes, reading can seem like a task instead of a pleasure.


During the school year when I become extremely busy with classes and reading textbooks, I am sad to say that I do not read for pleasure. The worst part about this is that I love reading outside of school and am always looking forward to starting a new book. The problem is that I just do not have the time. When I do have spare time in college, I usually like to relax my eyes and brain, not stimulate them with a good book. If I did not have so much homework and school reading on a daily basis, I would definitely make time for outside reading. During breaks in the school year (like summer and Christmas), I always am starting a new book, excited to have an opportunity to read something that I actually enjoy reading.

It is hard to pick a favorite genre of mine because all of the books I read have different plots and meanings. The one reoccurring theme that I can think of is romance. Every recent book that I have read has some sort of love scenario. Recently I have been reading books by Nicholas Sparks, Jodi Picoult, Stephenie Meyer, Emily Giffin, and Suzanne Collins. I really enjoy all of the different writing styles and stories these authors have to share. I plan to read several books by these authors this summer and am very excited.


Future Literacy Goals

My personal reading goals are just to read more things that I enjoy and to find more time to do this! I really do consider reading a hobby of mine and a true interest. I want to make time to really enjoy reading new books in a non-stressful environment unlike college. I also want to find more authors and books that I can really appreciate and add to my list of favorites. As for my professional reading goal, I want to read more books that will help me become a better teacher! I want to be the best teacher for my students that I possibly can, and I know books are a perfect way to gain insight about teaching. Hopefully I can use books to my advantage to help me in a professional environment.

My Experience with Vocabulary

When I first saw the title of one of our chapters in Graves this week was Vocabulary, I was not looking forward to reading it. Vocabulary has always been a struggle for me in past years and even in the present. I am bad at memorizing things and my vocabulary is not very strong. I feel that I do not know some words that are common today. I am not sure why this has always been an issue for me, but I have just never enjoyed vocabulary.

I am not sure how this happened. I feel that I grew up in a vocabulary-rich environment and still live in one today. In elementary school, I think I was fine. My difficulties with this subject came in middle and high school. The different vocabulary words we learned every week seemed so insignificant to me and irrelevant to anything we were doing in class. Most of the words I had never heard before and could not even pronounce. The thing that made me hate vocabulary is that I never saw a point to it. I knew that I was not going to use these terms when writing a paper and especially will never use them in everyday language, and that proved to be true.

That being said, I thoroughly enjoyed reading the "Robust Vocabulary" article. I love how the teacher taught vocabulary to his students and feel that ideas similar to these could be used in any grade level. The concept that stood out to me the most was that the students were able to pick the words that they wanted to learn. I loved this! My favorite quote was, "In readers’ workshop, students choose the books they will read; in writers’ workshop, students choose their writing topics. It makes sense to me that students should also have choice about the words they want to learn." This stands out to me because this was the main issue I was having with learning vocabulary: relating the words to my life. This idea should be applied in all classrooms. Having students pick what the learn gives them so much more incentive to work hard and learn. If I were in his classroom, I would have put words into the "Word Box" on a daily basis. I read so much during elementary and middle school and had so many questions when reading. This box would have been so helpful to me in my learning experience.

This teacher's ideas, in my opinion, were truly great. Having so many difficulties with this subject, I feel that his approach would have been so beneficial to my learning and especially my feelings toward vocabulary. Instead of dreading vocabulary time, I might have actually looked forward to learning something that related to me.