Committing to a Book Club Experiment

I know I’m late to teaching with book clubs. But I'm finally getting on board for an experiment, and I'm really excited about it. 

Why has it taken me so long? I really like whole class novels. I’m good at selling it—I don't have a problem with buy-in. Reading, discussing, and writing about the same significant topic builds a rich class culture. And even with whole class novels, I value teaching readers, not the novel, giving readers a pattern for capturing the way they use reading strategies, the questions they have, the images they envision, the great quotes and writing moves they come across as they read—so they can remember them for the next day’s discussion—equipping readers not just with knowledge about a given book, but with the skills, strategies, and confidence to read other books. 

Still, I kept hearing about this great pedagogical approach of using book clubs—giving students choice and agency—and it sounded great, like what real readers do. I wanted to try it—I really did. But what I was already doing was going well, so I didn’t really want to lose any of the novels I was already teaching—Wonder, Ghost Boys, A Long Walk to Water, and When My Name Was Keoko. 

Enter this year’s combined 6/7 class. Two years ago when I first taught Wonder, not a single student had read it. Last year when I taught the 4/5 class, I had noticed Wonder circulating. So this year I asked how many had read it, and over half of the hands in the class went up. I had 3 thoughts simultaneously: 

1. Bummer—I won’t get to have the experience of introducing it to these kids! 
2. Wow—That’s an amazing indicator for how a reading culture has grown in 2 years! 
3. Hmmm—This could be the perfect opportunity to try out book clubs with one of the options being Wonder! 

What are book clubs? Also known at literary circles, book clubs offer choice, peer accountability, and an authentic reading experience. A selection of books, usually with something in common (topic, genre, author, etc.), is offered for study. Students choose the book that best fits their ability and interest, and the group reading a given book sets their own schedule (within the teacher's parameters) for reading and discussing. 

During the study, the teacher can teach whole-class mini-lessons that apply across works. The mini-lessons can be on discussion skills (like how to respectfully disagree), reading strategies (like making inferences), or literary content (like characterization, plot structure, or symbolism). Students then apply the mini-lesson in their small group discussion that day. When the study is finished, students can compare the different books they’ve read. 

Yesterday, I ordered the books for the winter term’s book clubs. We’re doing this! 

I decided on the topic resilience. Then I hunted for additional books on the same topic that have a modern setting, but a variety of reading levels, cultures, and both male and female protagonists represented. Here are the choices I came up with:

• Wonder by R.J. Palacio: Auggie is a boy born with severe facial deformities who has always been homeschooled due to the need for frequent hospitalization. This novel follows him as he navigates his first year in school. It deals with bullying, friendship, growing up, and so much more. 
• Because of Winn-Dixie by Kate DiCamillo: This is a classic while also being the shortest and easiest reading level, specially picked for my many English learners who may be intimidated by the size of the other books. It still offers many opportunities for deep and critical thinking as the stray dog Winn-Dixie leads Opal into choices that build empathy and community.
• While I Was Away by Waka T. Brown: This is a true story about when the Japanese-American author’s parents sent her to Japan for 5 months to be reintroduced to her heritage, live with her grandmother, and attend the local public school.
• Caterpillar Summer by Gillian McDunn: Cat takes good care of her little brother Chicken while their mom is busy working since their dad’s death. Then summer child care plans fall apart and the children are suddenly dropped off at the home of their mom’s parents—who they’ve never met—on an island on the Atlantic coast of the US. Cat learns a lot about family, friends, and the variety of ways that people connect and reconnect.  
• Dan Unmasked by Chris Negron: Dan’s world is baseball, superhero comics, and his best friend Nate. Until an accident at baseball practice leaves Nate in a coma. Nate was always the heroic one. For Nate's sake, can Dan be the one to pull people together now? 

On 2 consecutive Fridays I spent a good chunk of the period introducing my students to the book choices. I read aloud the first couple of pages to give a feel for the style and reading level. And I put up a poster with Amazon reviews and left out a display of the books students could examine more closely during independent reading time. Finally, I asked students to rate their top 3 selections. 

All students but one got their first choice. That was because only one student picked While I Was Away for a top choice. I was surprised because I thought that being in Japan and largely Japanese, my students would really connect with that story. Maybe it was too much like daily life?

The final distribution looked like this:

• Because of Winn-Dixie: 7 (All of them 6th graders, so a good grouping, though the reason they gave was mostly because they liked dogs!)
• Wonder: 5 (Still a good chunk here--yay! One student said that even though she'd already read it, she'd loved it so much she wanted to discuss it with others.)
• Caterpillar Summer: 2 (Both avid readers, so this will be very fun for them, I think!)
• Dan Unmasked: 2 (Both very competitive boys who tend to read ahead and, intentionally or unintentionally, deliver spoilers. It will be interesting to see how they work together!)

It's been an interesting experiment already, and I think we're all looking forward to continuing it next term! Resources I'm using include the following by Lesley Roessing: 

• The 5 Steps of Facilitating Book Clubs (blog post)
• Talking Texts: A Teacher's Guide to Book Clubs across the Curriculum (book)

How about you? What is your experience with book clubs? Any advice for me?

The Awesome Peculiarity of Language

 

Photo by JACQUELINE BRANDWAYN on Unsplash

“What does ‘display’ mean?” one of my 8th grade English learners asked. I answered, “To show.” He and his friend stared at me in disbelief. Wondering why it was so hard to understand, I asked them to show me the sentence they’d found it in. It read, “He displayed his new toy.” To befuddle matters even further, “displayed” came at the end of a line and didn’t quite fit, so it was hyphenated with “dis-” on one line and “-played” on the next. It had never before occurred to me to think that “display” could be perceived to have a negative prefix like “displace” or “discontinue.” These two boys were clearly perceiving that. Especially because the sentence was about a toy! It seemed a whole lot more likely to them that the character had stopped playing with it. 

There is nothing like working with language learners to help me appreciate the awesome peculiarity of language in general and English in particular. The wonder of communication, the disaster of Babel's fragmentation, the fascinating array of language systems that humans have developed, and the beautiful determination of people reaching across those divides to learn to think as strangers think and come to love them. Still, the struggle is real, and it surfaces at unexpected times. A class primed for curiosity and laughter is the best antidote to the frustration that always lurks. This happens daily in my EFL class. Let me share a couple of examples from this past week. 

Every time we read in our novel about the character or his uncle going to the workshop, one of the students would ask, “They have that at their house?” I would explain that it was a room with tools where they worked on the bicycle and other things. The next time we read “workshop,” the same student asked the same question. I finally realized that the confusion was being caused by the word “shop.” He was picturing a store. I guess we could call it a work space, or work place, but that could just as easily be an office, sewing area, or kitchen. When we finally clarified that “workshop” was not a store, he asked,“What do you call a shop that sells tools?” “A hardware store.” Which makes no sense in this computer age.   

In the workshop, the character was making bowls out of gourds. After a long discussion about what gourds were (Google Image is my immediate go-to resource), whether pumpkins were gourds, and which was the bigger category—squash or gourd (these students are scientists and never run out of questions!), one student finally asked why I was making such a small cup of my hands when I was talking about the bowls. I said that I was picturing rice bowls or soup bowls. He said, “We only call big ones bowls.” I said, “It could be a serving bowl.” He said, “Not a serving bowl. We don’t have serving bowls in Japan. The meal is brought out in small dishes. A big bowl for mixing.” While Americans may have many sizes and shapes of curved food containers designated “bowls,” Japanese has a special name for each from chawan (rice bowl) to misodonburi (soup bowl).

The previous week, a student asked for a “Hotchkiss” (Japanese: hoh-chee-kee-su)—a stapler. Hotchkiss was a company that produced staplers (like Kleenex for facial tissues in American English, or hoover for vacuum cleaner in British English). I wrote on the board: staple (noun/verb); stapler (noun). One of the students asked what the “staple” noun was. I clicked the stapler, caught the staple that came out in my hand, and held it out to him. He said, “So, like a paper clip?” Nope, only this little piece of metal that comes out of a stapler. He looked at me incredulously and said, “There isn’t any other meaning?” I hesitated and ventured, “Well, there is one other meaning, but it is totally different. Do you want to know it?” He shook his head. We’ll save “main food” for a different day.

Another day we read the sentence “I skid to a stop and turn the bike partway around.” First a student asked what “skid” means. I mimed squeezing handbrakes, coming to a sudden halt, and pointed to the place there are black tire marks on the ground. “Ah! ‘Drift,’” he said. I’m familiar with the concept of the movie Tokyo Drift, but I assure the class that while this IS English, it is a very specialized term, and if they tell an English speaker that their bike drifted, they will more likely communicate aimlessness and slowness than power and speed. I’m not sure they believed me. 

Next, we established the fact that while “bike” (baiku) in Japanese means “motor bike” or “motorcycle,” it is an exact simile for “bicycle” in English (jitensha in Japanese). Even these advanced students had trouble wrapping their brains around that. I told them how confused I was when I first came to Japan, such a law-abiding country, and saw everyone riding their bicycles on paths clearly marked “No bikes.”  

The curiosities of language are endless. Here are a few more that have actually come up in class in the last few weeks. While "I love to eat" and "I enjoy eating" mean the same thing, if you stop eating, you don’t eat; if you stop to eat, you do eat. Sometimes one form of a word is related, but others are not: emergency is similar to urgency, but emergent has nothing to do with urgent. Sometimes the presence or absence of a creates a different meaning: I have a few friends (yay!) vs. I have few friends (boo!).

Isn’t language amazing? Aren’t our students who tackle learning a new one amazing, too? 

What language curiosities have you been fascinated with recently?

6 Moments: Sharing Bookish Joy

 

A couple of days ago I saw this post in a Facebook group for middle school teachers: “Been a rough week. I need some positivity. Tell me 1 thing about your job as a middle school educator that you really love.” In one hour, there were 47 comments, and only one of them was negative (“Nothing”). I was impressed that the poster had the impulse to reach out for other people’s joy rather than vent, and that so many others were so ready to share their joy.

That set me to looking for the moments that gave me joy. One of the things I really love is sharing books with students and seeing them grow in their independent reading lives. Here are some of those moments from this week:

(1) A 6th grader waved me over during independent reading time because she was so excited she’d discovered a comment from the author of the class novel we’re reading (A Long Walk to Water by Linda Sue Park) on the back of the independent book she was reading (Towers Falling by Jewell Parker Rhodes). It was so fun to see that student experience the coolness of realizing authors read each other’s books, and recognizing known authors in other contexts. 

(2) A 7th grader is noticing interesting words in her independent reading book A Wind in the Door. I asked her for an example, and she flipped a couple of pages and landed on the word aeon. She said, “I had to look it up, and then the sentence made a lot more sense.” I pointed out that there is a chain of Japanese malls named Aeon. She giggled and said, “Oh, yeah! Maybe because they want you to come in and shop for a very long time!”
 
(3) Another 7th grader, in his 3rd language, is reading Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Caine. He said, “We do what she says in class.” I asked him to tell me more, and he expanded, “The way we discuss things with partners and in small groups.” So he’s not only sticking with this pretty advanced nonfiction book (last year he’d read nothing but fantasy), he’s understanding it and connecting it to his life! 

(4) I recently added Room to Dream, the third book in Kelly Yang’s Front Desk series, to my classroom library, and there’s a waiting list to read it! When the first reader finished it on Friday, I got to pass it on to the next reader. 

(5) A student who's usually an avid reader has been starting and abandoning books one after another for a few weeks. I'd been trusting what I’ve read about the ebbs and flows of reading passion, and telling her not to worry, she’ll find one. This week she started and finished Pay Attention, Carter Jones by Gary Schmidt. (Which I then turned around and recommended to a student who’d just finished Three Keys and had to wait for Room to Dream.)

(6) Another student is such a voracious reader that she’s already devoured most of the books in my classroom library that she’s interested in—mostly historical fiction. A few weeks ago I read my first Jennifer Nielsen book, A Night Divided, and this student snatched it up as soon as I book talked it. A couple of days later, she asked me if there were more books in the series. I said no, but the author has written a number of other historical fiction books set in Europe. She got quite excited. But it takes a while for ordered English books to make it to Japan. In the wait period, I remembered that on my high school shelf I had Ruta Sepetys’s Between Shades of Gray about a Lithuanian family sent to Siberia by the Soviets. She finished that this week and was delighted to find out there were a couple more Sepetys books in our online library.

October can be a teaching slog—our grand vision at the beginning of a shiny new school year is beginning to fray at the edges, and holiday cheer is not yet on the horizon. It’s the messy middle. It’s a great time to remember to keep my antennae out for moments of connection, epiphany, growth—even the small ones. Because I generally find what I’m looking for—whether it’s reasons to be frustrated or reasons to be encouraged. Then tell somebody. Because things shared multiply—like iris bulbs. And whether you’re dancing or struggling through October, who ever said "no" to a little more joy?

How about you? How is your October going? What is something that gives you joy? Who have you shared it with?

When Student Questions Ignite Thinking

Photo by Ana Municio on Unsplash

Student questions are beautiful things. Not the fifth question about assignment directions. (I’m trying to teach them to listen to my explanation, read the directions themselves, and that failing, listen to my answer the first four times.) Not “Is this good enough?”  (I’m trying to teach them to develop their own expectations of excellence.)

The student questions that are beautiful are the ones that extend knowledge, deepen understanding, and build new insights. Unfortunately, students sometimes think asking a question is a show of weakness. A sign of this thinking is when I ask students to write questions they have in the margin of a text, and they come to the discussion proclaiming with satisfaction that they didn’t have any. They understood it all. Or their only questions are about the meaning of unknown words. 

Identifying what is unknown is an essential first step, a place to start, and it is only the launch pad, not the stars. The rocket boosters ignited in one of my classes last week—a middle school advanced English as a foreign language (EFL) class. We were reading When My Name Was Keoko by Linda Sue Park, a novel set in Korea during the Japanese occupation. We had just read about a character seeing airplanes flying overhead to Manchuria. From there, here’s my attempt at following the trajectory of the students’ questions:

(1) What is Manchuria? We confirmed the Japanese name.

(2) How did Tae-yul know the airplanes were going to Manchuria? We looked at the world map on the classroom wall and saw that China was the only option for Japanese planes flying over Korea.

(3) Why did the Japanese want to control Manchuria? We talked about natural resources, the colonial precedent of the western powers, and the slogan “Asia for the Asians.”

(4) How many countries did England control? I started listing some: America, Kenya, India, China, Australia….

(5) What language was spoken in Australia before English? We discussed indigenous people all over the world and the myth of empty land.

(6) How did the tiny island England come to control so much area? Wow. This could be an entire course, an entire book, an entire library full of books, but I channelled what I could remember from Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Germs, and Steel.

(7) But not all Japanese people did terrible things in the war, right? We talked about two types of responsibility—personal and corporate. As a Christian, I understand that individuals are fallen, and also that all the social constructs they make are fallen. People do bad things; the groups they are part of do bad things. No nation has the corner on this: last term we read about the US internment of Japanese-Americans. 

We also know that when we confess sin, personal and corporate, God forgives us and loves us. We have no face to save by defending ourselves, only grace and freedom to gain by confession. Then we can look into the faces of people who have suffered and say, “Please tell me your story. That’s terrible. What can be done to repair the harm?” People in the Bible like Daniel and Nehemiah set an example of repenting before God for the corporate sins of their ancestors in order to bring restoration in the present.  

(8) Didn’t God tell people in the Bible to kill other people? Yes. Yes, he did. Those are hard passages to think about. I think it has to do with God’s holiness, justice, and power. Let’s keep talking about it. And while those stories are old and difficult, we can know what God wants us to do today: love him, love our neighbors, love our enemies, do justice, care for the creation, and invite others to know him.

Whew! That was one crammed period—and we only actually read two paragraphs of the novel. But that’s okay because the important thing is not that we finished the chapter. The important thing is that students’ curiosity was ignited, and they began to want to know for themselves why the world works the way it does, what their place in it is, and how faith informs it.

I see a research project in this class’s near future, one driven by finding answers to the questions they still have, because I'm sure I didn't sufficiently answer them all. 

And I’m wondering what exactly happened on Wednesday to unleash that train of questions. All I can say is, I will keep trying to cultivate a classroom environment where it is safe to ask questions. I will keep inviting, expecting, requiring questions. I will keep telling students why asking questions is important. When questions come, I will keep celebrating, respecting, and giving time to them. And sometimes, like this week, the rocket ship will take off for the stars. 

How about you? What do you do to cultivate students' asking questions? When have you seen those questions drive deep thinking?