The Mindful SLP Podcast: The Book Whisperer Experiment Part 2 - Ep 009

In Episode 8, Denise interviewed Ramona Daun about her implementing "The Book Whisperer" by Donlyn Miller in her 8th grade English classroom. This episode, they finish up the discussion by walking through the daily life of a Book Whisperer teacher. Finally, they consider ways speech therapists can inspire reading in their clients. Don't miss this second half of their discussion. 

Links:
The Book Whisperer: Awakening the Inner Reader in Every Child by Donalyn Miller

Free Case History Form

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We want to thank Atiqnur Rahman for designing this form for us. If you would like him to customize this form with your logo and contact information, contact him here. 

Music: Simple Gifts performed by Ted Yoder, used with permission

Transcript

9 The Book Whisperer Experiment, Part 2

Dan: Welcome to The Mindful SLP, the podcast for SLPs looking for simple tools and optimal outcomes. Your host is Denise, experienced speech therapist, specialized in all things pediatric and Dan, business manager for her private clinic.

Denise: Welcome back listeners. Today's podcast is an extension of our last episode, The Book Whisperer Experiment. Just a quick recap for those of you who might've missed part one, The Book Whisperer is a book written by a teacher, Donalyn Miller, describing her methods for engaging students in reading her methods worked so well, that other teachers have started using them. My guest is Ramona Dawn.

Ramona is a middle school English teacher who has been implementing the practices described in Donalyn Miller's book. There was so much excellent information Ramona had to share that we broke this podcast into two parts. I invite you to go back and listen to that first episode. In our last episode, we covered Miller's philosophy for teaching reading, Ramona's classroom experiences that brought her to implement The Book Whisperer methods, and some of her success stories. Today we're going to talk about what a day in the life of a Book Whisperer teacher looks like. Can you walk us through how a class period you would go? And I want to talk a little bit about grammar starters. I mean, why do teachers do that? And what's the purpose of it? And you used to use them and you don't now?

Ramona: A lot of teachers take a concept that is something that is small, but needs to be covered, that they can break into small little chunks and they use that as their starter. Many teachers use grammar starters, and there's all kinds of package programs out there that teachers can buy. And, and they're good. I mean, a lot of them are good. And I've used them in the past myself, but I stopped doing that before, even this year, like, it's been, it's been like three years since I use grammar starters because I realized that students, they were dragging into my classroom.

They weren't excited to come to English. They weren't excited to do grammar, first thing, a shocker, right? I mean, what adult would like to do that. And so I have to ask myself when I'm planning. Well, what's fun about that? You know, it needs to be both, it needs to be educational, but it also needs to have an element of fun, right. And so, I mean, and I'm not knocking any teacher who's been successful with doing that, but imagine this, your fifth period class. The rowdy class after lunch, the class that has the higher perc..., the highest percentage of tardies, right. They're coming and they're sitting down...

Denise: Do they come in and pick up a book and start reading?

Ramona: Okay. So they come in and they start reading and they just open their books and they start reading ideally between 15 and 20 minutes. And then I have to be honest, there's been a few class periods that I've just let it go for 25 minutes because it's so wonderful. And what's wrong with that? My school has 65 minute class periods, we're on a modified block system. So then the other 25 to 30 minutes, we spend on other English concepts. We are, you know, learning how to write an essay, you know, things like that.

Denise: So they get ideally 20 minutes a day.

Ramona: Ideally. The teachers at the conference that I went to, that I don't think they had a 65 minute class period and they still made this work, the end of every 15 to 20 minute reading session, they started with 15 minutes and then they increased to 20 minutes to build the students' stamina, because we do have a lot of really reluctant readers in this mix. And at the end of every reading session, they would do a journal entry based on the key concepts the students need to know, um, such as characterization and character motivation and setting and scene, and author's purpose, author's purpose is the big one. If a student can explain why this character is doing something or treating someone a certain way or saying a certain thing, if they can explain why, they will ace every question on a year-end test that test makers can throw at them and, you know, couple weeks, and I don't need to model every day the journal entry, occasionally I might see a need to model a certain type of journal entry before kids actually read, so they know what to look for.

Denise: So as SLPs, you know what Ramona just talked about. Inferencing, that we're always trying to get our students to infer what someone doesn't state right out, that is so important. That's what we try and get so many of our language impaired students to understand. And our kids with autism, it's flexible, anyone can do this. You just need to be creative, right?

Ramona: If you have a 45 minute class period, you're not going to be reading stories out of your literature anthology, and you're not going to need to. This is the reading and the journal entry is the discussing of the reading. And after students read, then they get up and they walk around the classroom for a few seconds. I play some music. This music stops. They find a partner and they share their journal entries. And while they're sharing, I'm walking. And I'm hearing real authentic stuff.

Denise: Oh, that's great. That's great. So they come in, they read, they do some writing, they do book conferences with you and then they get together and they share, right.

I mean, that's what we do as adults. We say, have you read this book? And we share about what we've read. Nobody shares about a novel that the whole class was reading, right? I mean, what would be the point?

Ramona: I mean, well, we might call that a book club, but you know, that would be a book that I read because I wanted to, that I got to choose and not what someone tells you to read.

Denise: So is this simpler for you as a teacher than when you used to?

Ramona: Oh my goodness, yes. I have my students fully engaged for 20 minutes a day, doing a significant task and I'm not grading anything from that task. Now I am looking at their journal entries, most times it's just a checkmark. You did it good job, you know, occasionally it's like, wow, this is fabulous. You know, occasionally I'm seeing a student who's kind of slacking off, but then that's when I'm going to make sure that during their book conference, I'm going to ask them specifically about, well, how's your journaling going? What's going on? What can I do to help you be more successful as they do that book conferences? I find that I can get through all of my students in a couple of weeks. So throughout the school year, if you think about that, you're having an individual conference with every student every two weeks. I never did that before. I was always too busy doing the reading program.

Denise: Yeah. I just got to share, uh, from an SLP standpoint, something that Donalyn Miller quoted. There's a reading expert, Richard Ellington. He wrote what really matters for struggling readers. He discovered that students in remedial settings read roughly 75% less than their peers in regular reading classes, no matter how much instruction students receive and how to decode vocabulary, improved comprehension or increased fluency, if they seldom apply what they have learned in the context of real reading experiences, they will fail to improve as much as they could. So I think we can spend so much time talking about how to do something that we don't actually give them enough practice doing it.

Okay. you SLPs out there. I know you have probably had therapy sessions like me, where you spent so much time explaining to the child, how you wanted them to do something that you didn't actually get enough time to practice it. I know I've had sessions like that. And I think that's something we need to guard against in any teaching situation. And that's one of the things that Miller talks about is many reading programs spend so much time talking about how to read, and this especially happens to special education that they don't get enough time to read.

And, and that's the beauty of this approach is just give them the time to do the thing that's really going to fix the problem. Miller tries to help students find books, at their reading level, but she doesn't stop them from making free choices and from time to time, they might choose something that's not at their optimum level.

And she is okay with that. But what is wrong also with a child choosing something that doesn't work for them reading a couple of chapters, maybe putting it back and choosing something else. I mean, is that going to kill them?

Ramona: No. Well, that's authentic. That's what we do. You know that that's why Amazon lets you read samples on your Kindle.

Yeah. They've got to figure it out. Right? That's real life. Exactly. I just wanted to throw in one more thing. So there's a special ed teacher at my school who comes to my classroom, a couple periods a day. She's shadowing a couple of IEP kids. She only does that for part of her schedule and the rest of her schedule is teaching the reading classes. She saw what I was doing and she changed what she was doing in her reading classes to mimic what I was doing.

Absolutely. I can totally see that. I mean, this is what works. As SLPs, most of my listeners are probably SLPs, you might be asking yourself, okay. So I'm not the English teacher. What can I do? Well. If you're working in the school, you can share it. You can share this with English teachers, you can share it with parents. So right after I read this book, I got inspired. I have shelves of books. I pick and choose what I'm going to do with students. But most of my books just sit there unused because I have so many of the. I'm thought I'm going to start a little library.

Our community, just their library just had their used book sale. So I went and loaded up two big bags of books that you get for $10 each. And I just barely started. I got the library cards, I got a stamp. I mean, I'm not going to do it electronically because the tactile experience for those kids to stick a card and write their name on a card, I'm going to let them use the little date stamp, you know, that's all part of the, the coolness of it. I haven't got it all set up yet, but ever since I've read this book I thought oh, my goodness. I haven't been asking my parents if their children like to read, it's not even on my case history form, which I'm going to change by the way. But I have a child I'm very concerned about, she's going into fourth grade, she has dyslexia. I just been working with her for years to get her where she's at. I asked her mom, does she like to read? And she said, no, she doesn't like to read. I can read to her. She will never pick up a book and read on her own. That's what she told me. But of course I know she loves. We'll do some reading and then do stories all the time.

Denise: Her mom said she only likes non-fiction. She doesn't read independently, but if she's interested in the book it's non-fiction so I don't have many of those nonfiction in my library. So I picked up a whole bunch at the used book sale based on what you told me and what Donalyn Miller said about just gathering 15 or 20 books, you think they might be interested in and spreading it out before them, and we had five minutes left after a session, and I thought I can do this. My library's not totally set up, but I can do that. I'll grab a few things. And I spread like 10 books out on the table, and I said, well, what are you interested in? And she looked at one and she had real interest in her voice. And she said, oh, I think I'll read this one. We set it up for her. And her mom told me she was reading it on the way home. I was like, wow, here we go. So as an SLP, you can do things too, private SLP in the school, SLP. Um, and I told her mom read The Book Whisperer. She says, okay, I'm going to read this book. Thank you, Ramona, for telling us about your experience with The Book Whisperer, I know it's changed what I'm doing as an SLP. One with my inquiries about parents, about where their kids are with reading. I can influence that and I can help them through it. Any teachers out there listening to this, uh, I recommend reading this book and find out what you can really do to make a real fundamental change in your students.

Thanks for listening to our two-part episode on The Book Whisperer. As I went back and listened to this podcast, I decided to create a new case history form that does include questions for parents about their child's reading preferences and their reading capabilities. So if you would like a copy of that case history, come to SLP proadvisor.com and look in the show notes for this podcast episode.

Thank you so much for listening to our podcast and we'll see you next time.

Dan: Thank you for listening to The Mindful SLP. We hope you found some simple tools that will have optimal outcomes in your practice. This podcast is sponsored by SLP Pro Advisor. Visit SLP pro-advisor dot com for more tools, including Impossible R Made Possible, Denise's highly effective course for treating those troublesome Rs.

A link is in the show notes. If you enjoyed this podcast, please give us a five-star rating and tell your fellow SLPs. And please let us know what you think. Join the conversation at SLP pro-advisor dot com.