Today, I take you into our book group discussion day. Students love this day and really look forward to it. We meet every Thursday in the library. Students bring their books and a “literary focus sheet” much like Harvey Daniels’ book group jobs. These are intended for students to have specific passages to bring their members to in order to illuminate language, conflict, characters, and setting. We end our groups by connecting issues in the book to issues in the news, so students also come to discussions having read a news article, and they share out about what they have learned.
On these days, I hover a lot, trying to move around the room to listen in and offer suggestions as needed — how to phrase a question, how to invite conversation rather than telling what they think all the time. I see smiles, laughter, side conversations — which are so important to building a sense of community. I hear deep thoughts about characters’ families and worries, and I hear lots of questions – -sometimes assumptions and bias, too — about the people and places that are unfamiliar to the students. They tread lightly here, but they are also safe to at least talk about the unfamiliar to work toward understanding in ways they likely wouldn’t in a whole class discussion or written assignment.
As I have written elsewhere (http://www.ethicalela.com/book-groups-personal/), reading experiences are personal, and sometimes we want to keep it that way, but shared reading experiences can deepen our understanding of a text because of the different reading experiences shared during the discussion.
Your approach of coaching rather than steering the lit circles is so effective in putting the learning and thinking into the students’ hands.
I am enjoying your video blog posts. I do lit circles too, but we now have a lot of choice in reading so no whole class novels. Do you still do whole class novels or do you have a set of 4 or 5 around a theme or is it totally open to the kids?