Community Book Discussion Project

Poster2010

This past Thursday and Friday were our annual Book Discussions. We choose a theme, give students their choice of novels, organize them into discussion groups, and invite members of the community to join the student-led discussions. This year the theme was novels about immigrant experiences. Here is the project webpage. Click on the book links on the left to see the student work.

http://communitybookdiscussion2010-2011.wikispaces.com/

It’s a good project,  community members always give glowing feedback. Here are some of my observations about the project and some ideas to make it better in the future:

1. Not all students are equally involved in the discussion 2. Students could be more active readers as they read instead of speeding through the books and starting to think about the big ideas after the book is finished 3. During the discussion, students approach their questions with a right-wrong kind of mentality…they check questions off the list and are less willing to contend with issues that have multiple dimensions–they want questions to be answered and done 4. The outside research that was completed this year could have been stronger…how to get students to be motivated to learn more about an issue from the reading of a novel? 5. Although we had more community members than ever join the discussions, most are moms with current students or YHS graduates. I’d like to attract a wider variety of readers.

Some Ideas to Improve:

1. Make 8-12 discussion protocols available  and require they use at least 2 at different points in the discussion. 2. This is a difficult one to work on…maybe we could organize and require pre-discussion blog posts more so students are talking to each other while they’re reading. The problem is stealing the conversation from the live discussion. 3. This issue of one right answer is maybe a larger challenge with how to approach literature overall. It seems like students at Yarmouth are more focused on this one right answer phenomenon more than students at other schools I have taught. I think this is a bigger question…One thing we did differently this year is include some discussion around the theme in our classes. We read a poem by Jimmy Santiago Baca and an excerpt of Maira Kalman’s book And the Pursuit of Happiness in blog form, both available from this link: http://communitybookdiscussion2010-2011.wikispaces.com/Kalman+Baca+Assignment We should increase this kind of discussion and written work around the theme in the future 5. Lastly keep up marketing and promotion with posters, attending the readers circle at the Yarmouth library, and encourage readers to invite their friends who are readers. 6. Use this blog as a place to collect community member feedback and suggestions for next year.

The following documents include specific feedback and reflection: student feedback2011***communitymemberfeedback2011***specific improvements for 2012

Looking ahead to 2011: If you have any ideas for possible themes, please post them in a comment. Any thoughts about the theme of journeys?

2 responses to “Community Book Discussion Project

  1. Pingback: Portfolio 2011–Final Thoughts | Writing About Teaching

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