Last spring, I attended a conference by Kelly Gallagher and Penny Kittle, the authors of 180 Days, during which I was inspired to empower students by giving them more choice in their reading selection. I took a chance this year with my seniors and decided to do book clubs instead of the “one-novel-fits-all” approach. The students chose their books from a list I curated around a central theme of women’s empowerment. Their choices determined the small group “book club” to which they now belonged for the next five weeks.
The first day, the students determined their reading schedule. Each week, they annotated for certain literature elements that then fed their small group discussions which happened on Tuesdays. Since the books had similar themes, I had the small groups share out take-aways at the end of class. I wasn’t sure how that would work–if the students reading other books would find it relevant to hear take-aways from the others–but they seemed to be interested. The culminating project was a multi-paragraph essay on a theme they recognized in the book.
Here are my take-aways:
1. The students read their books. This may seem like a small thing, but getting students to read can be a Herculean effort.
2. All but one student did the weekly annotations. The one student usually did half, and he had trouble doing most of the other work of the class as well.
3. The discussions were rich. I did not have to work to get the students to talk about their books. They willingly engaged.
4. The theme statements were varied and insightful. I was worried that they would be redundant and superficial.
5. I felt a little left out. I was able to jump into a few conversations, but usually, I didn’t want to interrupt.
6. I wasn’t always sure that the conversations were productive because I didn’t hear all what was said. I also couldn’t correct any misinterpretations that might have happened in the groups.
7. Survey–The survey results were generally positive. Turns out, students were not interested in learning what the other groups had to say at the end of class. They were merely being polite.
I’d love to hear how other people offer choice to their students in reading, writing, projects, etc.
If I had choice of literature when I was in high school I would have flown through books with desire instead of clunkily read through the morning of a discussion. This is very cool! Student choice and voice in religion curriculum for the junior year, is being implemented next year, and I hope we find some success like you have!
I think it's great that you tried this approach with your seniors. It seems like at that point in high school, many of them have identified themselves as readers or non-readers, and it's important that we give the non-readers opportunities to become readers. It's also interesting that they did not like hearing about the other groups. We are currently doing book clubs in English 2, and yesterday I had one of the clubs share what their book was about with the rest of the class. The class was polite, but I'm not sure they got much out of it. Also, if you want to come observe an English 2 book club class, you can see how we are doing something similar.
Could you share the surveys? How did the essays turn out? I've taught where we had an independent reading component in a junior year curriculum and I did this with science fiction and students created culminating projects to demonstrate understanding-they loved it.
I wonder if we could implement this approach in all classes. If choice is the trick in getting reluctant readers to read, then sign me up. I need therapy to get over the begging, threatening, crying, bribing I've done this semester with the juniors in an effort to get them to read Gatsby. In the end, I gave a ton of class time to read, and my surveys say that 90% read 75% or more of the novel, but it was awful getting them there.
I love this post and I love the takeaways… i have to say that I joined a book club last year to encourage me to read more fiction (education books are awesome but I missed fiction) and I have to say that I have as of yet not missed my reading assignment and I truly look forward to the discussions about the books (even though I can't say that I loved all the books, in fact, part of the pleasure is finding evidence to back up my dislike :-)… honestly, I don't know if our discussions are that smart or if we even always get things right… but I am not sure it is that important, what is important is we have authentically discussed it.
On the feeling left out situation… wondering if you could insert yourself into one group each week… and really engage with them? or rotate the system… the share-outs they do would not have to be live, they could be virtual (voicethread or flipgrid).
ok I am going on too long … just to say this sounds fabulous!