This is an excerpt from Chapter Eight of The Read-Aloud Handbook by Jim Trelease
(Penguin, 2006, 6th edition). For a list of all topics covered here and in the
print edition see Chapter Eight list.

CHAPTER 8: Lessons from Oprah,
                           Harry, and the Internet

here are days when I honestly think I'm living in a parallel universe where during the last ten years Oprah Winfrey has had millions of people of every race and income level gladly reading books they'd normally never choose for themselves and the Harry Potter books have inspired millions of children to read 700-page books, while in the other universe, the education bureaucrats were trying to improve children's reading by testing them more than any nation on earth.¹

Oprah never gives a test yet her "students" rushed out and bought almost 900,000 copies of Anna Karenina when she selected it for her club. The first six Potter books contained a total of 3,365 words (more pages than Dickens' four longest novels) and not one page contained a quiz question. Since Oprah and Harry have been so successful, wouldn't you think the school folks would borrow a page or two from their methods and procedures? Instead, they do the complete opposite and expect to get the same results. You couldn't make up stuff like this!

So while we're waiting for the bureaucrats to drop by our universe, let's see what can be learned by looking at Ms. Oprah's lesson plans (we'll look at Harry next and then the Internet).

Two Lessons from Oprah

How did Oprah make TV into a “pro-reading” experience?

Television has long had a parasitic relationship with print, stealing many of its early reporters and analysts from newspapers and magazines. Local and network news departments still swipe a large amount of their material from daily newspapers, put a new tread on it, and peddle it a few hours or days later as their own. For decades, authors and writers have been mainstays on television as guests on the "Today Show," "Good Morning, America," "Larry King Live," and the daily talk shows. Television almost never gave to print what print offered to TV

You can't give someone a cold if you don't have one yourself.

Then along came Oprah Winfrey. In 1996, after ten years of sleaze and self-help as a show menu, her staff tentatively suggested that she do a “book club.” Oprah herself was a big reader, and had been since age five. Reading three books in a weekend (her normal diet) would give her an enormous advantage over nearly everyone in the television industry, as well as most teachers who don’t read that many books in two months.²

It has been Oprah’s reading appetite that drives the curriculum of her book club. There is no supervisor or syllabus telling her what she should like or not like. This formula will only work in schools if the teacher is a devoted reader, like Oprah—the Queen of Read.

Lesson No. 1: Oprah’s Book Club could never have succeeded if she herself hadn’t been an avid reader. You can’t give someone a cold if you don’t have one, and you can’t give a child the love of reading if you yourself don’t have it.

How does Oprah motivate her club members so successfully?

First, look at who is watching television at ten in the morning or two in the afternoon, when Oprah’s show is aired in a lot of places: not the valedictorians, or honor graduates, or the former gifted and talented students. They’re all working. Oprah’s “class” often consists of the laid-off, the laid-back, and the lying-down crowd, many people who hadn't read a book in twenty years, people who quit reading because they got tired of reading dead poets they couldn’t understand back in high school.

So having selected a book, Oprah simply walks out to her audience of 22 million in 119 countries and talks about the book she’s selected. She talks about the book, animatedly, passionately, and sincerely. No writing, no tests, no dumb dioramas to make, just good, old-fashioned enthusiasm for something she’s read.

Humans are first an oral species, not a testing species.

Above everything else, this is the key to Oprah's book success—she recognized what too many educators have forgotten: we're an oral species. We define ourselves first and foremost orally. When we see a good movie, a good ball game, a great concert—the first thing we want to do afterward is talk about it. When my wife and I see a good movie, do you think we rush out to the car, pull some napkins out of the glove compartment and write down the main idea? "Honey, what do you think was the theme?"

What can we apply from this to our work with children? Well, let’s eliminate not all but much of the writing they’re required to do whenever they read. (“The more we read, the more we gotta write, so let’s read less and we can work less, right?”) We adults don’t labor when we read, so why are we forcing children to? It hasn’t created a nation of writers or readers.

On the other hand, look what Oprah's created: when she began her book club there were 250,000 discussion groups nationally. Today there are more than 500,000 such groups,³ including a nationwide series called "One City, One Book," initiated by Nancy Pearl and Chris Higashi at the Washington Center for the Book, and certainly helped by the climate Oprah had created.

Lesson No. 2: More talk, less writing; more open discussion without right or wrong answers.

Oprah 'Lessons' in the Web or print editions of The Read-Aloud Handbook:

• How did Oprah make TV into a “pro-reading” experience?
• What does Oprah’s Book Club have to do with a class of fifth-graders who hate to read?
• If Oprah’s audience is so reluctant, how did she motivate them?
• Can the Oprah lessons be applied in the home?

NEXT: What Harry Potter can teach us about literacy

Chapter Eight — p. 1   p. 2   p. 3   Footnotes