Top 37 Donalyn Miller Quotes
#1. Why aren't adults, even teachers, reading, and what is this doing to our students?
Donalyn Miller
#2. I think that dormant readers might become engaged readers if someone showed them that reading was engaging.
Donalyn Miller
#3. Students will rise to the level of a teacher's expectations.
Donalyn Miller
#4. No matter the intervention, developing readers must spend substantial instructional time actually reading if they are to attain reading competence.
Donalyn Miller
#5. Failing to graduate a populace that values reading has long-term consequences for everyone.
Donalyn Miller
#6. 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.
Donalyn Miller
#7. 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.
Donalyn Miller
#8. 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.
Donalyn Miller
#9. Providing students with the opportunity to choose their own books to read empowers and encourages them. It strengthens their self-confidence, rewards their interests, and promotes a positive attitude toward reading by valuing the reader and giving him or her a level of control. Readers without power
Donalyn Miller
#10. I realized that every lesson, conference, response, and assignment I taught must lead students away from me and toward their autonomy as literate people.
Donalyn Miller
#11. 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.
Donalyn Miller
#12. 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.
Donalyn Miller
#14. When we meet and I discover that we have read and loved the same books, we are instant friends.
Donalyn Miller
#15. 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.
Donalyn Miller
#16. Books are love letters (or apologies) passed between us, adding a layer of conversation beyond our spoken words.
Donalyn Miller
#17. Reading shows us how to be better human beings, not just successful worker bees.
Donalyn Miller
#18. The purpose of school should not be to prepare students for more school. We should be seeking to have fully engaged students now.
Donalyn Miller
#19. If you ever think you have all the answers, it's time to retire.
Donalyn Miller
#20. 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).
Donalyn Miller
#21. 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.
Donalyn Miller
#22. Students need to make their own choices about reading material and writing topics.
Donalyn Miller
#23. Instead of standing on a stage each day, dispensing knowledge to my young charges, I should guide them as they approach their own understandings.
Donalyn Miller
#24. 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.
Donalyn Miller
#25. 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.
Donalyn Miller
#26. 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.
Donalyn Miller
#28. If we value all readers, we must value all reading.
Donalyn Miller
#29. Every book begins and ends with other people- the readers who suggest the book to us and encourage us to read it, the talented author who crafted each word, the fascinating individuals we meet inside the pages- and the readers we discuss and share the book with when we finish.
Donalyn Miller
#30. When my principal interviews candidates for a teaching position at my school, regardless of whether it's a language arts position, he always asks them to discuss the last book they read.
Donalyn Miller
#31. Our children shouldn't have to wait for adulthood to become wild readers. For many, it will be too late.
Donalyn Miller
#32. Are the activities and assessments we use accomplishing our intended instructional goals, or are they simply what we have always done?
Donalyn Miller
#33. If you don't read, I don't know how to communicate with you ... I can never express who I am in my own words as powerfully as my books can.
Donalyn Miller
#34. The uninitiated might say that I am lost in my books, but I know I am more found than lost.
Donalyn Miller
#35. Readers enjoy talking about books almost as much as they like reading.
Donalyn Miller
#36. 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.
Donalyn Miller
#37. 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.
Donalyn Miller
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