Book Clubs 10/19/15

The Book Club Companion by Cindy O'Donnell-Allen

Say:

     In The Book Club Companion, Cindy O'Donnell-Allen makes it clear that she has not revolutionized learning.  People have always known that putting students in small groups and letting them talk about literature together is a good idea.  Book Clubs however put the focus of the learning on the students.  They get to decide what book they read, and for the most part what they talk about when they meet in their groups.  There are however open ended prompts that can be used to help facilitate these book clubs.
     Book Clubs are similar to Socratic Seminars in that they give the students a more open ended idea of what they can talk about.  Both of these methods force us to look at how we lead discussions in our classroom and what the idea of discussion actually entails.  When we have a classroom discussion with the teacher at the front of the class and the students in their desks there is an expectation of the students to answer a right or wrong question.  These two methods however prompt the students to think about something from a text and then to just discuss their thoughts.  The teacher is as far removed from the discussion as possible so that the students do not feel pressured to be 'right.'  These two methods differ however in that Socratic Seminars are not a regular occurrence in class.  They certainly can be, but there is not an expectation to have them once a week.  Socratic seminars also have more students participating in discussion based around a book that they whole class is reading together and that the teacher has assigned, where book clubs are in groups of four to six and the students get to choose the book they want within a theme.
     The idea of book choice through me off a little in this reading.  I like the idea that students get to choose a book within a theme for the book clubs.  What we have been doing in this class with one anchor text and another reading would work well for book clubs.  You could have one classic text and then students could read a YA novel in their book clubs that would probably be more interesting to them and give them the option of seeing how entertaining literature is connected to these more literary works.  What threw me off though was that in the list of clusters in the appendix for this book were a lot of classic texts that were paired together.  I wish O'Donnell-Allen had given us a wider variety of types of text to read because while there are quite a few different themes, most of these books are books that I would rather use as anchor texts.
     The list of things involved in the social dimension of reading described in this text is something that I have been seeing in my time at internship A at Meadow Glen.  Lexington One uses Expeditionary learning, and we have been teaching a book called Lyddie.  So far the students have not read any of this novel outside of the classroom.  We have either read it to them in class, or they have read it with a partner in class.  My CT actually records herself reading the text ahead of time so that if they are reading on their own they have the ability to listen along if they need to.  The one thing on this list that concerns me and has always concerned me is the size of classroom libraries. Of course I think that we need to have large libraries, but I just wish that we had more funds to buy books.  All I want is more books.
   

Do:
My do for this week is a lesson plan that involves getting students acquainted with the book club format.  I will begin by introducing an anchor text for my students.  This will be something such as how we used Brave New World in this class.  I will associate that with a theme and use one of the thematic clusters from O'Donnell-Allen to allow students to choose texts.  After introducing the anchor text I will have students vote on what books they want to read and then put them into groups accordingly.  I want students to begin interacting with the text so I will then have them read silently for a few minutes before having them fill out the sheets that describe their expectations of the book clubs.  It is important to have students set up the goals and structure of their book clubs so that if they get off task they don't have an argument for getting side tracked because they are losing sight of their own goals.  The last thing that students will do is to do a short activity with their groups.  This will get them to feel more comfortable in their groups and give them a short taste of what will be happening in the book clubs.

Lesson Plan