Choosing the Right Book Choosing the right book is pivotal. “Book clubs that engage students in inquiry start with a good book selection” (Fountas and Pinnell, 2006). Effective book study groups center around books that are developmentally appropriate for students, as well as books that students love to read. It’s also important to choose books that are substantive and reflect layers of meaning that provoke talk. There are multiple ways to organize book clubs (Marinak and Gambrell, 2016). Some teachers find that it works best to organize the books as “text sets” around themes, topics, and genres. In this way, each student in the group might read a different book in the text set and then, when they gather in their book club to discuss, they build connections within in the text set as they compare and contrast the individual titles. Educators can create a text set drawing from a wide range of criteria: • Author study exploring multiple titles all written by the same author • Genre study reading across a particular genre such as mystery, biography, or historical fiction • Characters investigating similar characters across books such as a strong female protagonist • Text structure analyzing similar literary elements such as flashbacks or stories within stories Middle School and Book Clubs: A Perfect Match Early adolescence and the shift to middle school represent a significant milestone for most students. In addition to encountering more demanding literacy challenges across the disciplines, middle school students experience a complex relationship with reading and writing as they wrestle with their own self-identity. Adolescents crave social connection and autonomy, and book clubs—framed around independent reading, small-group decision- making, and collaborative conversations—are uniquely suited to address both needs. • Book clubs foster student choice and provide middle schoolers with lots of opportunities to make decisions, take responsibility for reading their books on time, and come to the book club prepared to talk about the text. This bolsters self-confidence, sparks engagement, and builds communities around books (Haas, 2013; Guthrie, 2008). • Engagement is the life force of adolescent literacy learning. Adolescents who see value in school reading will read and enjoy academic success. And those who don’t will read much less and typically fall behind. Reading disengagement is more often than not the root cause of school failure and dropouts (Guthrie, 2008).
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BOOK CLUBS
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