Reading Together and Questions to Investigate

I have A LOT of thoughts swirling around from these two readings. Maybe because I feel the school year coming closer and the real live readers coming my way, also because I know I will culminate my Ed S with a research question of my own and am asking myself all these questions when I come across other people’s research:

What matters to me?
What do I want to know? 

What questions are still out there that matter?
What excites me, what could I reasonably do? 

I absolutely invite response to these questions. I have been a passive receptacle in a lot of my classes, and I love absorbing it all, but I need help figuring out how to turn around and become the one asking the questions and doing the doing. 

So yes, the gist of these chapters from Kittle and Gallagher is that independent reading and book groups are more impactful than whole novel reading (but they do set time aside for those as well). This fits in with the amount of love and effort Buehler puts into “matchmaking” for student independent reading and organic little book groups that spring up. I love it.  I also super appreciate followable layouts like in Kittle and Gallagher’s chapter 3 where they clearly explain how they pace their different novel studies and provide their rationale for the 50-25-25 balance (46). Same with the Track Your Thinking tool on page 58 - We had something similar in 5th and I noticed vague versions of this during my first year in 6th last year, but I would like for things to be more consistent. Same with the “conversation movers” (60) - I live for explicitly provided scaffolds and frames like this and it’s like some I have used before but probably better. ! I liked the idea of letting students suggest and recommend books for the buy in and voice it provides and that would be something easy to implement in class next year (50).

Something I question: reading an entire book before any discussion as described on page 66. I have a hard time accepting this. Maybe it’s the age of my students, but I just think 6th graders need a little more accountability and structure to be successful in the process of reading an entire novel. Plus I need information on how they are doing with it as they go in case there are misconceptions or what have you. 

I want to talk about book clubs now. In 5th (I know I am always talking about 5th but we just had so many things in place that worked so well and jived with everything we are learning and I MISSED IT last year in 6th!!), we had something called “mini book clubs” - My colleague is one of those insnanely widely read on top of the newest books teacher I aspire to become. She would collect a few copies of the same novel and we started collecting them into bins. We ended up with so many that there were a LOT of choices for kids to build groups of 2-4 reading a high interest novel of their choosing. I want this for 6th!! It really resonated with me when they pointed out the difference between reading for school and reading for oneself (48). This is where my research questions started buzzing around.

Something in this is exciting me, especially the idea that, “Independent reading practice is the foundation of for building critical reading skills” (49). Is there a research question there, for me specifically, in my context, that I could pull off? On the margins I jotted this:

-Measure engagement?

-Measure analytical skills?

-Measure impact on comprehension for future “canon” reading?
Like, is any of this measurable, researchable, worthy? 

I want to try so many things and the problem is I find myself spread too thin doing way too much but none of it as thoroughly as I should. I want to do a study of Matt de Pena- I am in a picturebook class and quickly requested the picturebooks mentioned to maybe use for that and also for my actual class coming in a few weeks. I want to use the supplemental materials and poems and things on page 57, I want to do a social justice unit (cough in 5th we had a celebrating diversity novel study unit cough), I want to do it all! Is there a research question about social justice and YA book groups? Not sure what it would ask or how to measure it. 

And of course, there is the issue of the fact that I am entering my second year on a team of four. I wasn’t able to do much other than learn the ropes last year, and this year I have a little more sway, but I won’t be able to change everything all at once. I have let our short story unit be my focus - I requested class copies of Flying Lessons (anthology of short stories that are YA in nature) and hoping to boot some of the less engaging and inspiring oldies from the curriculum. But there is a lot to overhaul and I am frustrated that I can’t do more more quickly. I want to get us off Google Docs and onto Paper, I want us offering and expecting more exciting independent and small group reading, and I want to do better by them and their future reading lives in general. I agree that “students need voluminous reading before they get to college and the workplace… when they move away from the act of reading as performative scholarship and start reading because they are genuinely interested, reading volume increases dramatically… the reading they do in book clubs thus becomes a critical part of their strength and conditioning training” (77).

Anyway, all that to say, I know this is all over the place, but these are my authentic responses to the chapters and how I see them working in my actual lived pedagogy and practice… more questions than answers at this point, but not necessarily in a bad way.