Encourage collaboration.

It’s a beautiful thing, the excitement of learning alongside a peer. The trust and community that develops by believing in one another.  True for adults and children, staff and students.

Shared learning experiences build community and relationships.  The beginning of Regie Routman’s Literacy Essentials focuses on developing trust, “Get to know students, and help them get to know each other” (p. 14).  Without prioritizing the establishment of trusting relationships, teaching efforts are likely to fail. Not only on the first day of school, or when welcoming a new student into the room- throughout the year, trust matters.  By creating opportunities for students to work collaboratively together, they will support one another as learners, help one another as friends, and respect one another in the community. There are many names for the topic of this post: Peer learning, collaborative learning, cooperative groups, shared learning, buddies, partner work.  Whatever you call it, I hope it fosters joy, trust, and engagement in your classroom. 

Reading Spaces by Heather McKay (@HeatherMMcKay)

The other morning my five-year-old opened his eyes and his first words of the day were, “I loved reading books with you and daddy last night mama”. His words filled my parent and teaching heart to the brim. Words fuel me in all forms – long books, short stories, poems that make me gasp or laugh, and blogs that challenge what I thought I knew.  The greatest joy in reading for me is discovering another reader, online or in person, who feels the same way.

When I’m reading I fall into a private space, but when it’s a really good read, I immediately search for a social space where I can talk with someone else about what I’m reading. As a teacher, this lived in my classroom and hallway conversations and now as a literacy specialist, it lives in my work across schools with administrators and teachers. Regie Routman challenges us, “as conscientious educators to instill a love of reading in our students and to do whatever it takes to turn them into readers” (2014, p. 117). For my first post, I wanted to talk about what we do to intentionally create a joyful reading culture.

Through talking about texts that move us, disrupt us, and transform us, we share who we are and lay our reading identities bare. We express our reading identities through what we read, where we read, when we read, and how we talk about reading (Buehl, 2011, p.1). There are friends I can share research articles with, friends who love picture books as much as I do, and friends who mirror back their love of reading with late night texts demanding, “You just HAVE to read this book!”. As I move among schools working with staff in support of literacy, I get the unbelievable opportunity to share and grow reading identities with both students and staff.

I believe administrators and teachers play an important part of a creating a larger reading landscape in students’ lives. In my work developing and supporting our K-12 literacy strategy, I’ve noticed there are some strategic ways administrators and teachers are building a school-wide reading culture. When we intentionally create reading spaces, readers are born and thrive.

The following are three ways to approach building a school-wide culture of reading that caught my attention recently:

Administrators and teachers sharing their own reading lives

It could be a bookshelf that draws your eyes in your Principal’s office, a teacher sharing a professional read or picture book at a staff meeting, or an Assistant Principal popping in for an impromptu read aloud in a classroom. When administrators make time to share their reading joy, others will follow and the joy of reading grows. 

Students inviting others into their reading lives

It might be a single bookshelf that students adopt for a week in the learning commons or digital book talks accessed through hallway QR codes. When students have the space to talk about their personal reading, they joyfully embrace it. Offering students dedicated ways to share the texts they enjoy builds their autonomy and engagement and acknowledges the social nature of literacy itself.

Administrators, teachers, and students talking together about books

My husband’s school hosts an annual ‘Battle of the Books’ where teams of readers choose a collection to read and battle over. Many teachers in our board used the hype of March Madness to bring a themed ‘Battle of the Books’ to their classrooms. Literacy experiences such as these bring adults and children together into a shared reading space. Apprenticing students into how we read and how we talk about books provides the gradual release and feelings of joy required to become lifelong readers.

We must intentionally design spaces for students to come to know themselves and others as readers and participate in a joyful literacy community. It is not enough to teach students to read, we must open the door to all of the joys and opportunities of citizenship that reading acts as the gateway for.

What would you add? How do you build a reading culture in your life, your classroom, or in and between schools? Let’s share ideas as fellow readers and build spaces for readers to find their books, their community, and themselves.

References

Buehl, D. (2011). Developing Readers in the Academic Disciplines. Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

Routman, R. (2014). Read, Write, Lead: Breakthrough strategies for schoolwide literacy success. Alexandria, VA: ASCD

This is the first of hopefully many posts from another contributor to this collaborative blog. If you have a passion for literacy and leadership and would like to share your thinking within our space and with our audience, click here for information. 

How to Start an Online Book Club on Goodreads

I write this title to draw in readers with the assumption that I know what I am talking about. Yes, I do know how to start a book club. But to get it going and sustain it for the long run? That will be the topic for another post.

Here are the steps I have taken to get things started on facilitating a book study for a group titled School Leaders as Readers:

1. Get a Goodreads account.

Goodreads is one of my favorite social media tools. It combines my love of reading with the online networking that creates unique connections with other readers. I wish we had something like Goodreads for kids. You can create an account through your Facebook profile, which is what I did. Otherwise just create an account through your email.

2.  Start adding books and bookshelves.

You can categorize books in three ways: “To-Read”, “Currently Reading”, or “Read”. I have several books jockeying for attention in the first two categories. As for the books I have completed, I recommend creating personalized bookshelves. This is a helpful way to curate what you have read for others to reference, or simply for you to reflect on later.

3.  Create a Goodreads group.

While it may seem odd to complete the first two steps before this one, I think it is pretty important. To start a book club online, I believe you need to be seen as an avid reader. It’s not enough to read a lot but are not actively sharing our reading lives. We expect this of our students; why not us?

Starting a group is pretty straight-forward: Select “Groups”, then “Create a Group” on the upper right side of your screen. At this point, Goodreads guides you through the next steps of giving your group a title, adding a book you want to read with your friends on Goodreads (friends will find you or be suggested to you, no worries), invite friends to your group, and then create discussion boards related to the major parts or chapters of the book you are reading.

You will want to keep your book club group’s title and purpose pretty generic, as you will hopefully be reading several books around topics of interest within this online community. Since you are the leader of the group, it is imperative that you start the discussion ball rolling with your own initial posts. Below are the first three I shared for our group’s first book, Mindfulness by Ellen Langer.

As you can see from my initial post, I really need to read this book.

I ended up gifting a copy to the librarian, and buying a gift card for the Good Samaritan.

One thing I have appreciated about this online community is the sense of a “closed space”. I can write what I want to write, and not worry a whole lot about grammar, audience, purpose, etc. Of course, I am attending to those elements of good writing, but I am not worrying about it as much I might with a blog post (like this one) or more formal writing. No responses yet, but we only have six people in our group. If you are a school leader, consultant, or public education advocate in general, I hope you will join us for this initial experience. Click here to access our Goodreads community.

Bonus: Leave a comment on this blog post, and you are registered to win a free copy of Mindfulness by Ellen Langer!