Not Your Grandma's Book Club (D&Z 9+10)

I really like the idea of content-area book clubs. It’s not an idea that has ever occurred to me, and certainly isn’t something I have ever experienced during my education. I think that if they’re used correctly and sparingly enough, they could be truly invaluable tools for really getting students involved and interested in the subject matter.

I think perhaps the single greatest aspect of these book clubs is how learner-oriented they are. Students are able to exercise considerably more choice and have more independence than they normally ever would in a classroom setting. Teachers, of course, must still guide student learning, providing support and help when necessary, but students are, for the most part, pulling their own weight and making their own decisions.

Pulling kids out of the black holes that are textbooks is another great thing about these book clubs. Instead of reading hundreds of pages of dry text overstuffed with facts, students can read novels, articles, essays, and countless other forms of text that integrate the themes of history, or science, or mathematics into a more easily digestible format. And really, that’s what we want in our teaching. We wants students to be able to get through things without too much trouble, maybe even have fun while they’re doing it, but still learn things that matter in the process.

While I would love to use book clubs in my future classroom, there are some things that give me pause to do so. For instance, how big an issue is time management? How do we make sure that book clubs don’t become enormous time sucks, leaving us with no time for other ways of teaching and learning? And what about kids who just don’t like to read? Sure, you can always “bribe” these kids with material that really interests them, and part of the purpose of using these book clubs is to get kids to really enjoy reading, but there are always kids who will be resistant and defiant for defiance’s sake. How do we get these students excited about book clubs, and ensure that they pull their weight in their groups? Daniels and Zemelman address both of these issues to some degree, but I would really be interested in knowing a little bit more about how to handle them should they come up.

Lastly, I really like the idea of inquiry units because, again, they allow for student choice. I think that every adult who has been through the education system in this country probably couldn’t even count the number of times that their big, year-end assignment for a class was an essay or research paper. Sure, there’s some value in having kids write these kinds of things, but it’s minimal at best. Asking kids to actually go out and explore, question, interview, investigate, and discover will be infinitely more beneficial to their long-term learning. Depending on how the inquiry unit is structured, kids can attempt to find answers or do research about things that are personally important to them, or do work that is valuable in an interdisciplinary context. I also really like the kind of backwards engineering of the inquiry units. It makes so much more sense to construct an exciting and expansive project and then see what standards it meets than to see what standards need to be met and then creating bland, recycled assignments to meet those ends. And this is something that we, as educators, should constantly keep in mind: what goals do I, and more importantly, my students, need to reach? Okay, now how do I get them there in a way that is fresh, exciting, significant, and effective?

I found this nice little rubric (not quite 4x4, but it'll do) that could potentially be used for book club assessment. While I would likely avoid using an actual formal rubric for evaluating student progress, I think this rubric does provide some good criteria to be on the look out for, and could possibly be reworked into a less formal assessment.