Book clubs

  When thinking back to UBD and deep understanding of material I think book clubs can be very useful in many different content areas. For example in social studies, what better way to have students learn about the holocaust than actually reading about it themselves/ seeing the facts/drawing conclusions. They understand by doing the work versus reading chapter by chapter of textbook, looking up vocabulary, studying, and taking the test. Although all these things happen in a book club, the work falls in the students lap. They’re doing those higher levels of Bloom Taxonomy thinking so they’re remembering what they’re learning and they’re sharing those ideas with their group, holding them accountable for their work.

It’s true that book clubs exist everywhere even though we might not see it. Churches have bible study, libraries have literary book clubs, and stay at home moms has book clubs where they rotate books, there are all different adult groups and they’re all voluntary. Daniels and Zemelman say that there’s a strong need for teachers to set up reading discussion groups in their classrooms. This is traditionally known as reading circles or book clubs. I remember doing reading circles when I was in school and everyone had a role in the group, one person was the questioner, one was the illustrator, the vocabulary enricher and one is the researcher. Depending on how many students are in the group then there are more roles. Each student had to do their role because if not the whole group falls behind. The best thing about the book clubs is that the discussion combines collaborative learning where students are learning from one another and making sure their fellow group members understand and they’re doing independent reading. I think one of the best things about this is that students are learning far more than they would be the ‘traditional way’ and that they can be assessed on their book club journals in a nontraditional way. D&Z talk about how teachers can get rid of the idea of writing a summary about the book because the teacher already knows the book, so why would they want to read about the book over and over again. By reading a plot summary of the book it just shows the student knows the story. But by asking high level bloom’s taxonomy questions student get to show what they learned and why they think it’s important.

                  These readings reminded me of when I was in High School because I remember reading a book I really enjoyed and my teacher had us do lots of activities with it. My English teacher had us read the books Maus, a graphic novel by Art Spiegelman. The book is in the style of a comic book and it’s about Spiegelman interviewing his father about his experiences as a Polish Jew, Holocaust survivor and life in Nazi Germany. I loved reading this book and loved talking about it because it’s such an interesting topic and the best part, it illustrates every topic.

Here is the book in case any of the history teachers are interested...