Reading with Meaning, Teaching Comprehension

Revisiting Debbie Miller’s First Book for Primary Grade Teachers

© Margaret M. Williams

Sep 9, 2008

Debbie Miller has, in recent years, become very much an authority on teaching reading comprehension and developing effective literacy programs. The former first grade teacher from Denver, Colorado now travels the country consulting with teachers, schools, and whole districts about effective primary literacy teaching and learning, while modeling her dynamic teaching style. Her latest book, Teaching with Intention [Stenhouse, 2008] focuses on aligning beliefs about learning with actual teaching practices in the classroom.

In 2002, while still in the classroom, Miller wrote her first book, Reading with Meaning [Stenhouse]. Classroom teachers who acquired the book in its first printing will likely go back and find their copies tagged with sticky notes and highlighted with comments jotted in the margins. Teachers unfamiliar with Miller’s earlier work would do well to get their hands on a copy – preferably one they can tab, highlight, and mark up.

Real Teaching Strategies for Real Classrooms

Some people – many teachers included – believe there is a sort of mystique to teaching reading comprehension to young students, and to teaching it well. But Miller dispels that notion. In Reading for Meaning she demonstrates the process of teaching the comprehension strategies necessary for young children to develop into thoughtful, independent, and strategic readers.

She starts by developing a framework for teaching based on her own guiding principles of “gradually releasing responsibility to children as they gain expertise, teaching a few strategies of great consequence in depth over time, and giving children the gifts of time, choice, response, community and structure.” [p.6]

Then, as Ellin Oliver Keene states in the book's Forward, Miller “uses the natural seasons of a teaching year to reveal the gradual process of immersing children in a rigorous yet intimate learning environment…” [p.ix] She starts with September and talks the readers through the building of classroom culture and climate and the establishment of the Readers’ Workshop. She shows teachers how to foster, encourage, and build on students’ literacy development throughout the year, ending the book with a short reflection in June.

Rethinking Assumptions About How Young Children Learn

Imagine six and seven-year olds – children of any age, for that matter – building “schema” (and using that term as they discuss what they know and don’t know), making text-to-self and text-to-text connections (again, using that very language), inferring authors’ meanings, asking meaningful questions to deepen learning, discussing the non-fiction conventions they find most useful when reading, and synthesizing their learning. Debbie Miller not only asserts that young children can do all of this, she shows primary literacy teachers how to go about fostering such learning in detail in a year-long progression.

Miller’s approach to literacy instruction is one of believing in the power of young children’s thinking, modeling her expectations, and giving her students plenty of practice in a supportive environment. She follows that same model when teaching teachers.

Primary Literacy Teaching and Learning

Miller’s writing style in Reading with Meaning, is conversational, encouraging, and never preachy. Her organization is clear and precise. After she lays the groundwork for teaching reading comprehension in the first four chapters, for each skill set thereafter, she describes exactly what the skill is and what it will look like, models the necessary min-lessons or anchor lessons that will help build the skill, and shows examples of what to look for as evidence of understanding and independence on the part of the children.

Miller believes in her young students as learners and she believes in teachers as educators. Effective primary literacy teaching is part skill and part art. In Reading with Meaning Debbie Miller provides the coaching teachers need to learn the skill, and she provides the tools and the inspiration needed to develop the art. This book is well worth revisiting.

Miller, Debbie. Reading with Meaning, Portland ME: Stenhouse Publishers, 2002. ISBN: 978-157110-307-9.

For more resources helpful to elementary reading teachers, read reviews of Beyond Leveled Books, and Reading for Real.

Reading with Meaning by Debbie Miller [2002]

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