Donalyn Miller Quotes

Instead of standing on a stage each day, dispensing knowledge to my young charges, I should guide them as they approach their own understandings.

Exposing students to lots of books and positive reading experiences while building a network of other readers who support each other provides students with tools that last beyond the classroom setting.

Readers are made, not born. Few students spring out of the ground fully formed as readers. They need help, and we cannot assume that they will get it from home, but they should always get it from us, their teachers.

As Stephen Krashen and Joanne Ujiie (2005) assert, "Many people are fearful that if children engage in 'light reading,' if they read comics and magazines they will stay with this kind of reading forever, that they will never go on to more 'serious' reading. The opposite appears to be the case. The evidence suggests that light reading provides the competence and motivation to continue reading and to read more demanding texts" (p. 6).

Are the activities and assessments we use accomplishing our intended instructional goals, or are they simply what we have always done?

If we value all readers, we must value all reading.

Reading changes your life, Reading unlocks worlds unknown or forgotten, taking travelers around the world and through time. Reading helps you escape the confines of school and pursue your own education. Through characters- the saints and sinners, real or imagined- reading shows you how to be a better human being.

The Sixth Grade Nickname Game, by Gordon Korman,

I am a reader, a flashlight-under-the-covers, carries-a-book-everywhere-I-go, don't-look-at-my-Amazon-bill reader. I choose purswes based on whether I can cram a paperback into them, and my books are the first items I pack ingo a suitcase.

We have created a culture of reading poverty in which a vicious cycle of aliteracy has the potential to devolve into illiteracy for many students. By allowing students to pass through our classrooms without learning to love reading, we are creating adults (who then become parents and teachers) who don't read much. They may be capable of reading well enough to perform academic and informational reading, but they do not love to read and have few life reading habits to model for children.

By middle school, students have an image of themselves as readers or nonreaders. Students who do not read see reading as a talent that they do not have rather than as an attainable skill.

Books are love letters (or apologies) passed between us, adding a layer of conversation beyond our spoken words.

Although I enjoy digging through the library to help students find books, my aim is to help them develop self-confidence in choosing books for themselves.

This is how I show my students that I love them - by putting books in their hands, by noticing what they are about, and finding books that tell them, I know. I know. I know how it is. I know who you are, and even though we may never speak of it, read this book, and know that I understand you.

Students will rise to the level of a teacher's expectations.

Readers enjoy talking about books almost as much as they like reading.

I think that dormant readers might become engaged readers if someone showed them that reading was engaging.

I never tell students they cannot read a book they pick up, but I do guide them toward books that I think would be a good fit for them. I think of myself as a reading mentor-a reader who can help them find books they might like.

We reduce the effectiveness of reading interventions when we don't provide our lowest-performing students reading time and encouragement. Developing readers need more reading, not less.

The most effective reading teachers are teachers who read. According to Morrison, Jacobs, and Swinyard (1999), "Perhaps the most influential teacher behavior to influence students' literacy development is personal reading, both in and out of school" (p. 81).

No matter the intervention, developing readers must spend substantial instructional time actually reading if they are to attain reading competence.

Without spending increasingly longer periods of time reading, they won't build endurance as readers, either. Students need time to read and time to be readers.

Students need to make their own choices about reading material and writing topics.

Students will read if we give them the books, the time, and the enthusiastic encouragement to do so. If we make them wait for the one unit a year in which they are allowed to choose their own books and become readers, they may never read at all. To keep our students reading, we have to let them.

Failing to graduate a populace that values reading has long-term consequences for everyone.

I need to put forward more encouraging terms for my students than the negative popular terminology struggling and reluctant. Where is the hope in these terms? I prefer to use positive language to identify the readers in my classes. Peeking into my classroom, I see sixty different readers with individual reading preferences and abilities, but I consistently recognize three trends: developing readers, dormant readers, and underground readers.

I try to teach my students that books are a mirror, reflecting their own lives, and a window, giving them a peek into someone else's.

The uninitiated might say that I am lost in my books, but I know I am more found than lost.

Why aren't adults, even teachers, reading, and what is this doing to our students?

A classroom atmosphere that promotes reading does not come from the furniture and its placement as much as it comes from the teacher's expectation that students will read.

If we really want our students to become wild readers, independent of our support and oversight, sometimes the best thing we can do is get out of the way.

Reading shows us how to be better human beings, not just successful worker bees.