Book Club Model vs. Own Literacy Instruction

When looking at the book club model, I was provided with a great deal of insightful literacy instruction that I have not necessarily seen in our classroom context. It was explained that book club is a program that was created to meet three criteria. These are, guiding rather than prescribing, addressing a common problem in ways that are open to local adaptation, and reflecting current theory and research on the teaching and learning of literacy (Book Club Plus!, page 2). Book club is also used to address the problem of differentiated instruction (page 2). It is important target those students who struggle in reading and to have them engage in books that they are interested in and that are at their reading level. With this being said, “book club was designed to create opportunities for all students to engage with age-appropriate materials, whether reading at grade level, above grade level, or below grade level” (page 2). Book club also allows teachers to work with those students who are below grade level, mean while challenging those students who are above grade level. All of these criteria of book club were built off three guiding principles. One, language is fundamental to thinking, two, literature is the disciplinary content of the reading program, and three, school-based literacy education should prepare students to live and work in a diverse society. When I read these principles it immediately made me think of our community-based inquiry project and just how important it is to incorporate the students’ prior knowledge and community into the classroom instruction. Not only does book club offer multiple strategies for creating opportunities for all students to engage with age-appropriate materials, but it also provides comprehension strategies. These strategies include drawing on background knowledge, text processing, and monitoring strategies (page 14). The strategies used to draw on background knowledge include activating prior knowledge, building new knowledge as needed, making intertextual connections, developing vocabulary concepts, and predicting. Text processing strategies include summarizing, sequencing, visualizing, making inferences, synthesizing, analyzing literary elements, and using knowledge of text structure. Lastly, monitoring strategies include evaluating and adjusting predictions, asking questions, and clarifying. With these strategies, students can discuss the strategies with their peers in book clubs, and they can bring the strategies to the attention of the teacher and the whole class in community share (page 14).

So far, a lot of what I have learned about book club thus far has been about the reading aspect of literacy. After reading and researching more about book club, I have been introduced to the writing component of book club. This writing component emphasizes meaningful ways in which reading and writing connect and support each other. Stated in Chapter 3, “Developing strong writing skills is an important curricular goal in itself, but writing becomes relevant when students see it as a set of tools that helps them accomplish specific goals” (page 29). In book club there are four functions of writing such as, writing as a tool for reflecting on reading, writing as a tool for gathering and organizing information, writing as a tool for practicing literary forms, and writing as a tool for sharing ideas with others (page 29). Witnessing writing in my own classroom, it is clear that when students see writing as a tool and resource they achieve a lot more.

Now after having some knowledge and insight on how book club is run there are some apparent similarities and differences to how the literacy instruction is run in our classroom. We most definitely provide the students with age-appropriate materials and each student has their own reading-level books to choose from. Every week they go book shopping in the classroom library where they are to choose books at their reading level and books that they are interested in. The writing component of literacy instruction teaches the students about how writing can be seen as a set of tools, just as book club does, although we accomplish this during our writer’s workshop. Unlike book club which consists of a five to fifteen minute block of community share time, followed by reading, writing, book clubs, and closing community share for three days a week, as well as literacy block two days a week which includes guided reading groups, skills centers, journal writing, etc., in our classroom we have reader’s and writer’s workshops, making meaning, and daily 5, five days a week. In our classroom literacy activities, all components of literacy are seen and evident. In our writer’s workshop, our mini-lessons consist of a connection where we put the day’s work into the context of children’s ongoing work and explicitly name what we will teach that day. Whatever we teach will be something the children will use as often as they write. The connection is then followed by teaching where we teach students a new tool or concept that we hope they will use often as they write. Every mini-lesson also includes active engagement time where we set children up to briefly use the strategy or concept we’ve tried to teach them. The last component of our writer’s workshop mini-lesson is the link where we restate our teaching point and either try to ensure that every child applies this new learning to their ongoing work today, or encourage children to add today’s teaching point to their repertoire of possible strategies or goals. The students then have individual work time while we teachers confer with students one-on-one. After the work time is over, we all come together and share what the students worked on, practiced, or the strategies they used during their writing time. Our reader’s workshop is also set-up in a similar fashion, beginning with the mini-lesson with the same four components – connection, teaching, active engagement and link – followed by independent reading time, then partner reading time, and a then sharing. Each time the students are reading independently or with a partner, we are working on stamina and building up how long they can be actively engaged in reading or writing. Another aspect of our literacy instruction is daily 5. It is during this component of literacy where the students participate in five centers – reading, writing, listening, retelling, and word study. All these components of literacy are seen throughout the day and over the course of the week.

When thinking about our writer’s and reader’s workshop and all the components of literacy instruction included, I realized that the students have opportunities to write into a unit/text, write through a unit/text, and write out of a unit/text. I had never thought of these writing objectives within book club plus as this kind of instruction but rather as a beginning, middle, and an end to a lesson/workshop. Every writer’s and reader’s workshop begins with a mini-lesson where the lesson is introduced also like setting the stage. Relevant background knowledge is announced, and questions and purposes for the lesson are given which is equivalent to the writing into objective of book club. Another part of the mini-lesson deals with active engagement where information is charted often, important information is identified, as well as details, plots, and settings. These activities go along with writing through a unit/text which supports students’ meaning-making as they read and listen – from exploring words to making text-to-self connections (Book Club Plus!). The writing out of a unit/text is seen in our workshops at the end when the students come together to share. The students are able to reflect about concepts and ideas they encountered during their reading/writing, and extend their understandings to new situations and connect their reading and life experiences to a theme they may have been exploring (Book Club Plus!). During the writing out objective, I would like to promote more reflection on personal, creative, and critical findings, rather than just making text-to-self and text-to-text connections.

Overall, I feel that our literacy instruction is fairly similar to that of book club; the main difference is that we do not sit our students in book club groups, mainly because they are first grade. I would love to try out book clubs in the lower elementary grades to see how the students would respond to the texts and if they could make more connections and extend their thinking!