How Dr. Sharon Faber
and the Virginia Middle School Association
Have Influenced My Teaching
ABINGDON, VA—Get in my teacher time machine with me! We’re going to revisit March 2004. It was a pivotal month in my first year of teaching. My principal at the time, Belinda Mullins, knew I was a different sort of teacher. She lived through my first year as a change-of-career professional—lived and survived to tell about it. In her infinite wisdom, she connected me with two huge streams of professional development that had absolutely no limits. One was the Appalachian Writing Project, a satellite of the National Writing Project; what that organization taught me about writing has kept me in the classroom. The other organization was the Virginia Middle School Association. Put yourself in my seat, if you will. A white van full of seasoned teachers, sitting in the back seat listening to all the talk. There in the moment, included, but still looking in because of still learning the ropes. Feeling like you know a lot, realizing in retrospect that you didn’t know as much as you thought. Imagine going to your first ever teacher conference after an especially long winter…the excitement of the unknown.
Norfolk, Virginia. March. Blustery and sunny, the ocean air very different from the crisp Appalachian smell of home. The hotel/convention center was huge, and everyone from my school split up to cover their respective tracks of programming. My schedule was unique enough inclusion, language arts, and world geography. So much to do, so much to see and hear. I only saw my travel companions at mealtimes and at night. I heard Rick Wormeli talk about middle years, an affirmation since Dr. Bob Raines (my faculty advisor at Emory & Henry College had gifted me the book Wormeli wrote on the subject). I heard so many others: strong teachers presenting their ideas blew me away. Then there were the nationally known speakers—new to me. Among them was Dr. Sharon Faber. She had a new book titled HOW TO TEACH READING WHEN YOU’RE NOT A READING TEACHER.
Dr. Faber shared many strategies for helping students become better readers. I had taken courses on how to teach elementary school students how to read. Dr. Ron Diss (creator of PALS) and Dr. Herb Thompson taught me how to teach young children how to read, how to solve problems when they could not read. As amazing as the course was, it did not offer wisdom on how to teach middle school students reading skills. Therefore, what Faber offered me was a solution set to multiple problems with reading in my middle school classroom. I read her new book cover to cover many times. I had two copies of the book because my principal gave me a copy a few days before the copy I ordered arrived. I never sent the second copy back and marked it up with pens, highlighters, and sticky notes. The nice copy Belinda Mullins gave me is autographed by Dr. Faber. You see, I hung onto every word—even the jokes and conviction to get out there and make it possible for every student to grow as a reader. I took it to heart and even went back to school to get a Master’s degree in Reading. What Faber called an inner voice, I call a Secret Reader. Even in the face of accountability of teachers, my focus has remained on her Action Plan instead of the expected Lesson Plan. In my mind, she prompted me to beyond the lesson plan so that my students would learn to take action instead of just do the work.
Now, if we take that time machine to my classroom, year after year, month after month, you will see that what I learned from Dr. Faber on that fateful day in 2004, became a part of my teacher-nature. It was absorbed to the point of being more than an intrinsic part of my work with young adolescents in the classroom setting. Now part of my nature, I didn’t need to refer to the text very often, and that is likely because the book and my methods were seamless, vertically articulated, inseparable.
Via time travel, we move through all the budget cuts, legislation, test scores, student success stories, the McGlothlin Award, the time volunteering on the Virginia Middle School Association board. Zooming forward twelve years to the present, we finally stop on an important date—October 20, 2016 (the day before the VMSA Annual Conference on the campus of James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia.
The setting? The hotel parking lot carpool line. This nice lady introduces herself—Dr. Sharon Faber. This is where I relive an important moment in my life and leave you, the reader, to observe a very serious few seconds. When Sharon Faber introduced herself, I was overjoyed. When she said, “I’m Sharon Faber,” I beamed. “Yes, I know!”
I told her that I knew her from my first VMSA conference where she spoke about reading. She listened to me talk about how I was given a copy of her book, how a copy of it was so dog-eared from loaning it to others. When I said I had the first book already signed and that I had brought the revised version for her to sign, it was magical. You see, I came full circle at that moment. Serendipitous moments do not come often, and this one was not wasted! My whole teacher life flashed from the first moment to the conference to meeting her in the parking lot.
And that is not where the story ends. No! You see, we are at an interesting time in history. The mood of our nation is not at its best, and it is up to educators—especially those at the difficult middle level—to step up and help students achieve and work toward their future selves. Not all students can see beyond whatever happened before they got to school that morning, or beyond the two minutes till they are excused for lunch. We are living in the world wide web of amazing. We have to be able to communicate intelligently, coherently, and critically with the rest of the world. We have to do this in the face of ignorance and a national movement toward isolationism and intolerance. These are hard times, and the influence of educators on young adolescents is more important than ever before. To teach students to read right now is more important than ever because the person who reads, thinks. And the person who thinks can sift through rhetoric and metacognize intelligently enough to help solve the world’s problems.
Sharon Faber, the keynote speaker at the 2016 Virginia Middle School Association Annual Conference, reminded me that “comprehension is taught, not caught’, that my students are not like a box of chocolates, but rather like a box of crayons, and reading (despite what publishers and politicians say) is NOT NOT NOT an initiative! Like she did in 2004, Sharon Faber has prompted me to become an active advocate for my students, to empower them to think and take action, to grow forward to the future.
There is no need for a time machine now. Having come full circle in my own destiny, I realize that my teaching adventure has presented an epiphany: Every child who enters my classroom will understand and appreciate that the act of active reading is timeless.
(Special thanks to my friends on the VMSA Board of Directors who are responsible for strong leadership in all things middle. This I Believe!)