Book Club Fever

I've caught it. It's highly contagious. And I've got the fever. Book club fever, that is.

Everything that I read and breathe these days deals with book clubs. I'm in the middle of a major review of literature for a grad class, and I am proud to say that I chose something that I can truly enjoy. And I chose something that has widespread ramifications for the high school English class.

Good books demand good talk. Marginalized readers often do not understand how to find a book and a library, even a small classroom library, can seem very daunting. But get kids talking about the last book that they enjoyed and someone will surely step up and say, "I'll give that a try!" Book clubs engage student in that necessary talk.

The more I read and the more I see, the more powerful I realize book clubs are. And I've got the test scores to prove it. Students engaged in authentic book clubs are more likely to have significant gains on Measures of Academic Progress tests. Students grouped by like levels and then given a high-interest appropriate leveled book are even more likely to have significant gains. This shows great promise for our lower-level students. If structured correctly, I believe that they could improve grade levels over the course of just one school year. And that improvement is invaluable.

The Power of Book Clubs

"We were to experience how the ordinary pebble of ordinary life could be transformed into a jewel through the magic of fiction." (Reading Lolita in Tehran, 8)

To anyone who is a reader, there is no doubt that books change lives. The only thing stronger than a good book is the powerful conversations that surround that text. This is where the true power comes in.

Reading instruction at the secondary level is a tricky thing. How do you teach a seventeen-year-old mother to read? Where do you start? Do you do a miscue analysis and examine her grapho-phonic mistakes? You can. But imagine engaging her with literature that is on her life-level (Tatum) instead of on her reading level and then following up those textual experiences with genuine conversations. It is this type of reading, the reading for a discussion, that changes the nature of reading itself. This type of dialogue, with peers and with the text itself, help readers to rethink and re-envision who they are in context to their lives and how those lives relate to the text and the world around them.

Book clubs are our best chances to reach these students who feel like school has stopped reaching out for them. They view reading as a chore, not something that is enjoyable. Reading is a stringing together of symbols on a page. It's a scavenger hunt for similes and metaphors and foreshadowing, but not for understanding. Students don't search for how these things relate to the beauty of the work; they just know what these things look like in order to bubble in the right answers. But imagine a group of girls looking at the way a simile wraps itself around a comparision to create the image in a reader's mind. Imagine looking at the way a metaphor showcases the craftiness of an author.

This won't happen in isolation. But it can happen in valid, real-life conversations about books. It can happen in book clubs.

I'm looking forward to seeing the year-long effects of book clubs on teenage girls. The potential for life changes is great. As I work my way through the Nafisi memoir about her female book club in Iran, I see that book clubs can and will change the lives of the students involved in them. The conversations just need to be guided.

What Really Works with Struggling Readers

I just finished deeply reading a 2004 article from English Journal by Dauna Howerton and Cathy Thomas. Their article, "Help for High School Students Who Still Can't Read," gives powerful insight into what secondary teachers can do to help their struggling readers in high school classes. There were many interesting points made, with vignetters offering realistic examples.

So what does matter with struggling readers? What does work? I recently sat through an extensive sales pitch (even though it wasn't supposed to be) that offered lots of options for testing and identifying needs in struggling readers, but I did not run out and buy anything. There is really only one thing that works for struggling readers. Reading. That's it. That's the magic answer. They just need to read more. And they need to read stuff that they like.

The fact is that our students start to see a decrease in the desire to read around the 4th grade. What does this coincide with? Standardized testing, for one. But also an increase in nonfiction texts in science, social studies, and health. Not exactly page-turning-reading, you know?

Unfortunately, as Howerton and Thomas pointed out, our reading programs lack the systematic instruction to help students with these new types of texts. From third to fifth grade, students can receive at least sporadic skill instruction, but this instruction is buried in a content-focused ELA class more and more as students move into upper grades. They simply do not get the skill instruction that they need. However, regardless of skill level, students can gain leaps and bounds in reading ability by simply reading more and reading at their "life level" (Tatum).

We use book clubs in human growth & development at NHS. The teacher has selected several texts that support the curriculum covered over the course of the semester. These students, mostly tenth graders, are tested using the Measures of Academic Progress test at the beginning of the year, sometimes the middle, and at the end. Students in the lower percentile of reading levels showed large gains in RIT ranges after participating in the content area book clubs.

Another guaranteed method for increasing student fluency--something recommended by every great literacy thinker and tried and proven in classrooms--is reading to students. This something else that has been tried at NHS. The teachers that do it always come back to me and can't believe that even their hardest kids will sit still and be read to. The students love it, no matter the age. As Howerton and Thomas point out, "story time" is often long gone by high school, but the benefits are not. Hearing someone read expressively from a text can help improve student fluency levels and that can only aid in comprehension of more difficult texts.

So want to see great gains in your student acheivement? Read to them and give them time to read for themselves. That's really all it takes, believe it or not. If you want the hard data, stay tuned. I'm gathering and will post it as I find it. Happy reading!