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 :)