Matchmaker Matchmaker Find Me A Book

 

Buehler focuses a lot on the importance of teachers to develop their “matchmaking” skills to pair students to books. A lot of considerations go into this - the right book at the right time for the right kid. To achieve this, teachers need to be extremely well read and to have a mental rollodex of alllll the possible titles. This feels like such a big job, but this class has actually taught me I can consume a lot more books a lot more quickly than I thought and provided me a means to organize them. Taking it a step further, Buehler describes a teaching team who uses an ongoing chart to track the books and group them by different criteria (p.80). This idea captured my imagination. 

I also teach on a team and we are expected to adhere to the same curriculum between two 6th grade classes. This means, me and my co-teacher can’t just decide to offer new choices for our class novel study because we want to - It needs to be a joining team division and all of us need to share in the understanding of what and how we will teach. The chart seems like such a great way to communicate between four team members and combine all of our thoughts. I came into this team last year dismayed to find the class book shelf an abandoned no-mans land. The teachers didn’t know or care what was on those shelves - Luckily our media center and “library” elective takes a lot of that on, but I want to also participate in the matchmaking process and have a class library with offerings for 6th graders that may not be in the school library yet or at all. 

On top of pairing books with kids based on their interests and what will challenge and connect with then, Buehler brings up the necessary aspect of the politics of books. This is a politically charged time for books! Also, getting an entire team to add and select new novels and getting admin to agree to the changes and buy the books, will require some strong and ready made rationales. I thought the chart idea could be extended to include rationales. It would be ready made responses to answer questions like “why this book?” As Buehler puts it, “we need to rehearse what we’ll say when we’re asked to speak about their value and why we’re committed to teaching them” (88) - Putting these answers on the shared chart could give confidence to other team members and make sure we have a unified and strong response. 

I liked the re-imagining of the classic tasks in chapter 5. I am all about disrupting a binary when I can, and that’s what Buehler describes doing on page 91. I recognize a lot of our 6th grade tasks here and like the metacognition that would be required for students to examine things like reviews, award processes, and even marketing techniques for books made for their age group! I wrote ‘fun’ next to the idea of doing a YA genre study and think it would pair well with a traditional genre study to make sure they have widely applicable skills and the rationale is strong. “Relevance” as described by Buehler is at the heart of it all and possibly the theme of this blog post (109). Can we provide rationales that prove this work is relevant beyond our classrooms? Can we “cultivate the habit of applying literary concepts and literary ways of thinking to books [students] choose for themselves so that they’ll read those books with increasing skill and insight”? (109). I am looking forward to bringing these ideas to the table with my team as we plan the coming year’s LA units.