Melissa Wells' Blog Post 1: No More Independent Reading without Support, Section 1

In my imagination, I'm on the set of a new gameshow called "Teacher Feud."  Two contestants, both teachers, stand behind their buzzers, hands poised for action.  The question pops up, "What is the #1 challenge facing teachers in classrooms today?"  Instantly, the first contestant buzzes in.  "Time," she states assertively.  Sure enough, the word "time" appears in that number one slot on the board.

Miller and Moss focus on the challenges of finding time to devote to independent reading in this section.  I know the time struggle is real.  I'm flashing back to my own time struggles in my first year teaching kindergarten, my third year teaching overall.  I didn't have an independent reading time for my kindergarteners that first year.  Like Miller and Moss said, I was "guarding benches"--I was doing reading-like things (doing centers where they had to match letters to initial sounds of pictures, creating flipchart games where they had to sort pictures and words into groups by their phonemic features, and so forth), but my students rarely had the time to READ.  It took me until the end of my second year teaching kindergarten to figure out the management of independent reading in my classroom that worked for me.  It took bravery to find those benches I had been guarding and letting them go.  Instead of morning work, my students read.  Instead of rotating through 14 centers a week, my students rotated through 3 daily:  reading with a teacher, writing with an assistant, and computers.  Instead of letting time hold me captive, I had to find those minutes and use them wisely, as Miller and Moss said on p. 3.

I know the time struggle is real, but I see my role as a literacy coach to partner with teachers so they don't face this struggle alone.  We have to recognize those things we do because we always did--Donalyn Miller calls them "wallpaper" in her book, The Book Whisperer--and we have to make changes with our students' needs in mind.  Miller and Moss also wrote about their conversations with teachers who said they didn't know their students as readers.  To me, this is the most exciting part of teaching reading and literacy coaching--to help make the normally invisible reading process visible, so both teachers and students can know themselves as readers.  Instead of relying only on standardized tests that somehow convert the complex reading process into mere numbers, teachers can know their readers through conferring, kidwatching, and miscue analysis.  We can grow readers with the careful investment of time and informed instruction based in actual reading opportunities.