Online Book Clubs

Cassandra Scharber, Digital Literacies
Elizabeth Edmondson, Wiki Literature Circles Digital Learning Communities (my FAVORITE of the BB readings)
Diane Lapp and Douglas Fisher, It's All About the Book
Harvey Daniels and Nancy Steineke, Mini-Lessons for Literature Circles (Fantastic, Fantastic Resource for Teachers)

The online readings this week describe the concept of Book Clubs for an online format, and the focus for most of the BB readings inculcate the inclusion and use of digital technologies. The physical book for this week, Mini-Lessons for Literature Circles, offers incredibly useful mini-lessons to help teachers who want to begin literature circles but might be a bit uncertain how to teach the non-literary analysis aspects of talking and listening. In these readings, I see a combination of the theory and knowledge of reader-response and formal analysis with the research involved in literacy, as well as the research surrounding how we learn to talk and listen to one another.

The BB readings highlight the creative and highly-relevant approach of using technology to create online book clubs. Moodle is an web 2.0 product that allows Scharber to create pleasure-reading-focused book clubs. Students read a book of their choice (Lapp and Fisher also support the GREAT importance of student-choice in determining books for clubs and lit circles), then meet for a week online to answer discussion questions, chat live, and exchange ideas with other readers. These online book clubs are highly successful, as Edmonson also proves, because of their focus on utilizing students' "first language," which is now arguably digital technology. Edmonson quotes Prensky, who argues that today's students "are used to instant gratification when they have questions; they can process information at an extremely fast pace; and they prefer game-based learning with frequent rewards. Today’s teens also prefer graphics before text rather than the converse, and they thrive while multitasking and performing parallel tasks [...] Perhaps most notably, teenagers like to feel plugged into a network (Prensky 2)." Edmonson specifically utilizes wiki pages to allow her students digital "voice." I like Edmondson's handout titled "Daily Roles and Responsibilities." These Daily Duties are what the students use to create the online wiki; they read and take notes outside of class (sounds familiar -- like the currently popular flipped class structure) so that class time can be used for discussion. I need to revisit the figure detailing Edmondson's "Digital Learning Community Wiki Design," as she describes in detail how to construct and design each page of the Wiki. Great resource for the future!

Daniels and Steineke offer many different mini-lessons to help students experience the literature circle most effectively. Some of their lessons focus on initial community-building. This makes sense, as teachers are ideally constructing book clubs around book choice, but students often have trouble opening up to peers with whom they're not already friends. Teachers should make sure to offer some ice-breaking activities to help students get to know their new group members.The Membership Grid in chapter two looks fantastic for this activity; the students are able to "practice the same focusing and questioning that is necessary for an in-depth discussion about a book" (Daniels and Steineke 40).

One of the great features of Mini-Lessons for Lit Circles is the way the mini-lesson chapters are structured. Each one is clearly titled and includes the time needed (explanations are made in the first chapter for the average length of classes that works best with these mini-lessons). The mini-lesson has a "Why Do It?" explanation preceding the how-to of each lesson.  Samples, both of handouts and from students, are also included. Another great feature of Daniels' and Steineke's book is the "What Can Go Wrong?" feature at the end of each chapter/mini lesson. This helpful section exemplifies why Daniels and Steineke have sixty-two years of teaching between them--they are able to help readers predict and prevent classroom situations from getting sticky.

What is extraordinary about MLfLC is that it is a TEACHING book -- it shows teachers exactly how to shape and create the dozens of small lessons necessary to create a classroom lit circle that works. Teachers can use this book to write one or two mini-lessons, or to flesh out the creation of an entire unit! The book obviously reflects the theory and research discussed in the first chapter, and it is written in clear, concise prose that integrates pragmatism and humor.

Do:

I found this chart in the BB reading about Grading Literature Cirles and I think it simplifies the process well! There is a space for each student's name, a way to check that they "prepared for discussion" and "participated in discussion" and then a space for notes. This reading also showed how to help a class create the book club rubric, and how to teach them to assign value to each criterion. This chart is an easy way to keep track of students, and might help when communicating with parents through conferences or concerns.

Book Clubs

Cindy O'Donnell-Allen, The Book Club Companion: Fostering Strategic Readers in the Secondary Classroom

Say:

I think that Cindy O'Donnell-Allen is my spirit animal. Her thoughtful, warm, articulate book titled The Book Club Companion is quite possibly the most helpful thing I've read this semester. O'Donnell-Allen discusses the theoretical and research-proven reasons why book clubs are essential for student literacy, but she also delivers a pointed, useful and extremely pragmatic road map to incorporating book clubs into the secondary classroom. She has an obvious resonance with teachers, and writes from an "insider" perspective; unlike some educational theorists, O'Donnell-Allen does not write to hear herself talk. As she mentions in the introduction, she writes this book because a friend encouraged her to get down on paper what she's been doing for a decade in class. The result is an good read for anyone interested in the specific and strategic implementation of book clubs in the secondary classroom.

What I find so thrilling about O'Donnell-Allen is her incredible breadth of knowledge about all things literacy. Reading her book was almost a review of all the material we've read during this semester! She discusses the roots of book clubs as aligning well within the foundation of reader-response criticism, but offers ways to develop responses so that students move into formal and critical analysis. "How do we engage students and maintain rigor at the same time?" she asks. "Must we sacrifice one goal for the other?" (76). I'm telling you: I love her.

O'Donnell-Allen also centers the entire idea of effective book clubs (and, therefore, students becoming more strategic readers and writers) around educational research arguing that students must have safe, emotionally-stable environments in which to learn. She describes how the addition of book clubs to the secondary classroom can immediately help create learning environments which are student-centered, collaborative, constructionist, and inquiry-based! Book clubs seem seriously grounded in all of the research and pedagogy we've been reading this semester. O'Donnell-Allen, then, does what great educational writers do so well -- she writes clearly, grounds her ideas in sound and practiced pedagogy and research, and offers implementation how-to's that can guide both beginning and veteran teachers.

O'Donnell-Allen's devotion to Vygotsky's "zone of proximal development" is especially profound when she connects it to the research of the past twenty years regarding adolescent needs. She discusses the "social, personal, cognitive, and knowledge-building dimensions" of classroom life, and explains how these are encouraged, fulfilled, and conditioned by the use of thoughtfully-constructed book clubs. She discusses the ins and outs of practical implementation--her passages on sequencing and recursivity are especially helpful--and offers loads and loads of organization tips and APPENDICES so that I can actually DO what she's done for decades.

I've had loads of experience with Socratic Seminars, but I never truly understood book clubs before O'Donnell-Allen. I misunderstood lit circles, small-group discussions, and book clubs to be the same animal, but O'Donnell-Allen clearly explains, delineates, and expounds on book clubs in ways that convince me that I've never truly done a book club. I'm tremendously excited to try them in my own classroom!

Do:
Lesson Plan Addendum: Here is a quick mini-lesson on choosing a book for SSR I was asked to do by my CT -- the structure is self-exploratory, and students had a good "jumping-off place" for finding possible reads. This occurred in a one-to-one class, so every student had an ipad with ereader!

For my own classroom, I will use most of her appendices to do THIS:

"A week or so before the first book club session, you've given your book talks and students have submitted their top three choices. Based on these choices and your instincts about social dynamics, you've organized students into book clubs and announced who will be reading what. Students have made a reading schedule and met in their book club to devise a set of book club norms. You've also selected a response tool [there are ten awesome ones] students will use to record their reactions to the text and stimulate exploratory discussion. The only task that remains is to teach students how to use the response tool [...] Once you're confident that students understand the reading schedule, how book clubs will run, and how to use the response tool, they're ready to start reading. A week later, book clubs can begin" (91-92).

What fantastic tools she offers in the detailed appendices. Incredible. Oh, and guess what I just found? Cindy O'Donnell-Allen writes a blog. Yup.  Here it is:

https://blogessor.wordpress.com/

Enjoy :)

Fostering Talk Around Literature

M. Copland, Socratic Circles
Styslinger and Pollock, The Chicken and the Egg
Styslinger and Overstreet, Strengthening Argumentative Writing with Speaking and Listening (Socratic) Circles
Dr. Vicki Gibson, The Common Core Standards on Speaking and Listening
Milner and Milner, Developing an Oral Foundation
Various authors: assorted guidelines, rubrics, questions, handouts on Socratic Seminars
Robert Probst, Response and Analysis
Robert Probst, Tom Sawyer, Teaching and Talking


The main focus this week is on talking--how to teach our students to do it, how to assess it, and how to use it to allow students to gain a more critical and sophisticated understanding of texts. Socratic seminars are discussions around text that minimize the influence of direct instruction and lecture and, instead, allow students to form communities of learning that promote individual expressions of engagement and analysis. There are many ways to organize a Socratic Seminar, but the premise is built on at least two groups of students who explore talking and listening in turn, and who are not dependent on a teacher to lead the discussion. Socratic "circles" can be incredibly effective in promoting high level thinking and formal analysis, as well as encouraging all students to respond in some way to a group-read text. The goal of a Socratic seminar is to avoid what some scholars have called "recitation" and instead promote the kinds of "authentic discussion" we would like to be "the common mode of discourse in most classrooms" (McCann, 2006).

The readings raise some interesting possibilities regarding how a teacher might be able to interact with a text in front of her students without being perceived as the authority. A usual Socratic seminar discourages the teacher from intervening in conversation, unless it is to clarify or unpack how the students are discussing. I think it's Probst who says that if a teacher has the kind of relationship with her students where she is able to offer opinions that do not "ring" of authority, she might be able to engage in this kind of talk. The key is classroom community--both for building a positive and supportive atmosphere in which to conduct a Socratic Seminar as well as for being part of such a discussion without students feeling they need to take notes.

I have facilitated many Socratic seminars and I think they're fantastic. I definitely wait until the classroom community is established, explicitly teach them how I want the seminar to run, and then we get started. I have found SS to be especially powerful with certain groups of students; I had an honors class that regularly blew me away with their SS discussions. They were, in fact, able to use a lot of the SS conversations as foundations for their literary analysis papers on Frankenstein. I think SS is worth the time and research to set up and facilitate. Students love it, and authentic learning comes from authentic talking.

Do:
I really like the activity called "Finding the Poem" that Probst suggests using as a beginning-of-the-year ice breaker. You need a few simple poems -- to make the activity with groups of four students, you'll need several poems with four stanzas each. Probst suggests, "print one stanza of each poem in a large, readable font on an index card. Shuffle the cards together and distribute them to students. Then instruct students to move around the classroom, introducing themselves to each other and comparing stanzas until they find another that seems to fit with theirs. When two students have found a match, they continue to roam as a pair until they find the rest of the poem. When the students are satisfied that they have complete poems, ask them to sit together in their group and put their stanzas in what seems to be the right order. Then you might ask each group to read its poem aloud and tell you something about why they settled on that order of stanzas" (49).