Laura Riemsnider's bolg post #4 Miller (2013), Section 1: Not This: Is There Enough Time? And Is Time Enough to Support Independent Reading

Miller (2013), Section 1:  Not This:  Is There Enough Time?  And Is Time Enough to Support Independent Reading?

I read this book at the beginning of the school year, but I decided to blog on this chapter for the month of November because I felt like it was a good time to reread this chapter. We are in the full swing of the school year and many teachers are exploring independent reading.  This chapter opened my eyes to a great deal of things the first time I read it, but just like any time you rewatch a favorite movie or hear a new song again, you catch new things or something jumps out at you that didn't jump out before. You make new connections. The first thing I realized on my second read was that I had a brand new connection. The first few pages of section 1 of Debbie Miller’s  No More Independent Reading Without Support discusses a visit she had to a school in Baltimore, and some of the epiphanies the staff had were over delicious crab cakes. My personal connection is that I will be flying to Baltimore for the Thanksgiving break and I too will be dining on some delicious crab cakes. I will also be reading through all of my wonderful teachers’ blogs. I wonder if I too might have an epiphany in Baltimore over delicious crab cakes while reading their blogs. The first time I read this chapter I pondered over the small things that we do during the school day that take up a lot of our instructional time. Debbie Miller lists a large number of these “benches” that she says we are guarding, and I agree with her when it comes to this. There has been lots of discussion this year about what we have done in the past, what we are currently doing, and what we would like to see happen. This is been one the most wonderful school years for discussion among professionals and I’m glad to be a part of it. I have had many conversations with teachers about the benches that they are guarding and have heard some wonderful things from them about changes they have made in their classrooms. Looking back on my own teaching I know I could sit down and make a list of benches that I was guarding. I believe that some of the tough parts of the reality of teaching are the benches that we are told to guard. I feel compassion for the soldier who guards the bench in the anecdote, because he was actually guarding it because someone ordered him to. I have seen reading programs come and go. And most are put into place under wonderful intentions. However, within the first year of adoption they find themselves subjected to limits and changes that take away from the validity of those programs. Those programs sometimes become benches that are guarded. They might be guarded because they are bought and paid for, because they help to fulfill the requirements for a law or other legal requirements, or because we're in the middle of rolling those programs or starting of programs and it's just what we do. I hope that the conversations we have this year lead to having more teacher input to determine what's best within their classrooms. Many times we look at a school and say we need this or we need that to help solve a problem such as low test scores or an area in which the school is struggling. I feel like that is a one-size-fits-all band-aid placed on everybody's wound. When in reality I feel we need an educational triage by which teachers, very much like your emergency room nurses, can take a look at what student needs are coming in and then figure out what we need to address their needs. After that, we can start to figure out as a whole, any programs our school might need. When it comes to extra programs outside the traditional classroom, such as after school, summer school, tutorials, volunteers, and clubs, having a program put in place by the administration or district level can be very successful, but within our classrooms where our highly educated teachers spend months with the students, we have the luxury to find out who our children are, what their specific needs are, and then to design curriculum around them.