Powerful Questions for Book Club in High School

Questions for Book Club

I have struggled to succeed with book clubs (or literature circles) throughout my teaching. This year I was able to break through with powerful questions for book club that both enriched my practice and sustained my students.

What if I set up book clubs better? 📚

Here are my tips:

Anticipate your readers. I made a slightly different list for each class by segmenting my readers using my 3D reader model. I knew who liked to read what. It was so cool when students chose the book I had chosen for them (and I told them as much!).
Gather a large volume of choices. I gave each class about 12-15 choices. I distributed a list with blurbs to the class and then shared them all while the checked off the ones that sounded interesting to them.
Make the grouping visible. Peers matter. I wanted students to choose what they were reading and who they were reading with in a single class period. We went to the library because it has an area with tables and chairs. They sat (most naturally) with the people they would want in their book club. Some chose the books together; others didn’t care about the people so much as the books. This process was a little messy, but I think the positive peer pressure to read did me more favors in the long-run.

typical-book-club-questions — Here is the choices list I used with one particular period. Short and sweet

What if I shortened the feedback loop? ♻️

in a typical book club, students have several reading days followed by a discussion/activity day. This has crashed and burned often for me. I wanted to increase the incentive, so we followed a daily protocol. This protocol is a version of my literary lesson plan.

5 minutes: teach the skill of the day
20 minutes: reading and independent note-taking
10 minutes: discussion
10 minutes: exit slip

Students had to read in order to be ready for that day. They also didn’t have to wait so long to talk to their friends. Finally, they could respond in real-time to what they were reading. I set a general “be on page ***” goal at the end of each class period to help them keep general pace, but being caught up with the group in these micro-moments was its own motivation. Students who hadn’t read all year started reading, and some even finished early!

What if I emphasized process goals? 🎯

For each activity (reading, discussion, exit slip), I set process goals–how they would complete the activity. During reading and notes time, I emphasized that it was an independent time and redirected students as needed (“You’ll talk to your friends in ___ minutes. Get ready!”).

During discussion, I set a discussion skill to practice and students took turns being the coach. They gave feedback to their group and shared it on their exit slip to me, which helped me be in many places at once.

questions-to-discuss-in-a-book-club — Student coaches are a big help to me–and the students become more self-reflective as they monitor each other.

During exit slip, they would again work independently using what that had taken notes on and discussed. I set production goals for how long the answer should be and what it should include.

What if I graded everything? 😬

I didn’t want to do this. I don’t, in general, grade daily practice. Maybe my fear that they wouldn’t do it got in the way. However, I also see students’ point of view: if daily work is so important, why isn’t it rewarded in the classroom currency of grades?

So, I made an exception. Students received a daily 3-part grade based on the Common Core standard:

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.9-10.10 By the end of grade 10, read and comprehend literature, including stories, dramas, and poems, at the high end of the grades 9-10 text complexity band independently and proficiently. (emphasis mine)

Reading independently was graded on reading during reading time and coming to discussion with notes already completed. Reading proficiently was graded on the exit slip. It was a nominal grade, but I still provided feedback on the exit slip, letting students know what I needed to see the next day across the three areas. I think this fairly instant feedback kept them on their toes in May.

I wasn’t sure how to track the data at first, and while I don’t like to focus on “deficits,” I knew in this case it would be much faster. I wrote down on this sheet everyone who was absent or didn’t do each task that day.

What if I asked better questions for book club? 🤔

The standby model for questions for book club is through roles, as promoted by Smokey Daniels and Nancy Steineke in 2004. A teacher can’t prep unique questions for each book, so she assigns different roles for different students (question asker, illustrator, vocabulary expert, etc.).

Unfortunately, this method seems to have saturated the market. Even one of my students asked if she was going to have to do this work, which she called babyish. She’s right! Also, no one reads like that.

Instead, we had a two-fold focus: letting students be authentic and the skill of the day.

My students didn’t need much help in coming up with authentic questions (and honestly, the less schoolish they can be, the better), but I did provide question starters for students who needed them.

The skill of the day allowed me to review all the skills in the Common Core. The notes and discussion questions gave them all the necessary information they would need to answer the target question on the exit slip.