I have read great
books where I will lose track of time and before I know it a couple of hours
has passed by. I will sneak in another
chapter when I should be doing homework.
I try to make and find time in my day to get another couple of minutes
of reading a good book. Reading is so important
to Donalyn Miller and she tries to create as much time in her classroom for her
students to read their book. The saying “Do
as I say not as I Do” is not in Miller’s agenda, when the students are reading
she is also reading. She models the
behavior she wants her students to achieve.
“The more my students read, and grow into a community of readers, the
more they want to read” (Miller 50).
This is one of our many goals we should be striving for in our
classrooms. Reading is one of the single
literacy activities one can do in the classroom to get more positive growth and
positive effect on the students’ comprehension, vocabulary and writing.
In a time where
most schools have very rigid curriculum schedules, how can we make time for
reading? On a regular class day teachers are bound to get interrupted by other
personnel, phone calls, and parents.
Miller recorded in a one week being interrupted enough to lose 40
minutes of instruction time. In a
regular classroom, students see this as a great time to talk, catch up and
basically get off task. In Miller’s
classroom her students have been instructed and ingrained to take out their
book and start reading. Using “bell
ringer or warm-up” activities are those worksheets or board work that is
designed to get students in their seats quiet and ready for the day. She starts off her morning with some
independent reading instead. This is a
time when everyone is reading, and has set strict rules where this is not the
time to catch up on homework, e-mails, or cleaning out binders. Another time for some independent reading is
when they are finished early with a task.
Most classroom have these “fun folders” for the students who finish early
but when looking at these types of activities usually what it contained was
just “busy work”. Usually picture day is
a madhouse, with teachers trying to get their students to line up quietly to
take their picture and then to proceed to be quiet while waiting for everyone
else to be done. This is a great time to
have students bring their book and read.
There are probably
more moments within the day that could be best utilized by allowing the students
to read, we just have to look deeper and find them. I will end this post with, “by setting the
expectation that reading is what we do, always, everywhere, it becomes the
heart of a class’s culture” (58).
It is amazing to me that her students have developed the habit of reading whenever there is time at hands. Her students sound so disciplined and self-motivated. In contrast, my college students will "read" their phones whenever they get a chance. I really want to know how she trained her students to do that. It cannot come easily and naturally to the students.
ReplyDeleteWhen students completed their work early I used to let them go to our classroom library and read a book but one time I was told by a teacher that I should have something planned for them to do and that just sending them to read was bad. So I spend a lot of time thinking of things for kids to do when they are finished early and honestly sometimes it does feel just like busy work and I hate that. I like the idea of finding more times in the day to read instead of doing pointless work.
ReplyDeleteI have the same concerns. I would love to teach by example, but with out new evaluation system, will it "look bad" if we are sitting and reading while the students are? ):
ReplyDelete