Spotlight on Literacy
Taking Teaching from “Good to Memorable”
with Teacher Book Clubs

by Rebecca McKay Director, Literacy and Professional Development with Muscogee Cornerstone Coaches

“There is abundant evidence that summer reading loss is one of the most important factors contributing to the reading achievement gap between students from high–socioeconomic families and low–socioeconomic families. What teachers do during the final month of the school year can increase the odds that students will choose to read over the summer.”  [IRA president, Linda Gambrell: http://www.reading.org/publications/reading_today/samples/RTY-0804-summer.html ]

As the school year comes to a close, Cornerstone network schools have scratched the surface of our study on closing the achievement gap.  We know that summer reading and learning are important elements as we journey toward improving schools for students as well as for teachers.  Addressing summer reading for students is critical, but what about summer reading for teachers?

Roland Barth speaks to teachers as learners in Improving Schools from Within.  He explains:

“Just as potters cannot teach others to craft in clay without setting their hands to work at the wheel, so teachers cannot fully teach others the excitement, the difficulty, the patience, and the satisfaction that accompany learning without themselves engaging in the messy, frustrating, and rewarding “clay” of learning.” [Barth, 1990]

Ellin Keene reaches a similar conclusion from her informal research of 17 exemplary reading teachers who work daily to improve equitable learning for students.  Keene discovered seven traits in teachers who moved their instruction from what she calls “good to memorable”.  The first trait is teachers who as researchers of their own reading and metacognitive habits.  We know that the use of adult book clubs and discussion groups are prime techniques for this teacher research, yet book clubs are often forgotten when schools plan their study groups.  Recently, I interviewed a group of teachers about their personal reading and its impact on their instruction.  The results prove noteworthy as we search for ways to close the achievement gap.  What could happen this summer if we ran adult book clubs and studied our own metacognitive strategy use?

A Teacher Voice on Reading to Teach
Excerpts from the “Teachers as Readers” book club at Stemley Road Elementary show the possibilities as teachers attend to their own reading strategies.  The impact of adult book clubs on the instruction of comprehension strategies is mirrored in the following words of a young teacher as she discusses her journey to provide exemplary reading instruction for all of her students:

Interviewer: How are you learning to be a teacher of comprehension strategies?
Teacher: Basically in the first year of my teaching, I curled up with the Debbie Miller book, Reading for Meaning, and tried to model what she was doing until I felt comfortable on my own.  After my first year, I did a lot of reflecting and I see where the adult book club connected the dots. I did not see how it all fit. The book club has helped me to get the bigger picture of reading comprehension.

Interviewer: So how did you use Debbie Miller’s, Reading for Meaning?
Teacher: I said exactly what she said, word for word. If I lost what I was supposed to say, I would look back into the book.  I had a script taped on my chart. I have read the Debbie Miller book so many times. I read to teach!

Interviewer: How has the book club made an impact on your instruction?
Teacher: The book Beloved put me in the shoes of my students and made me feel what it is like when students have a hard time reading and understanding. I guess that’s the biggest thing that went “ding, ding, ding.”  Also, it is important to talk about your reading with others so you can build meaning together.  This was particularly true of the book Beloved.

Interviewer: How has awareness of schema made an impact on your teaching?
Teacher: For me, the reading of To Kill a Mockingbird was the beginning of my personal realization of what happens when you do not have schema for a time period or place, and then it really became real to me when I started to think about my crafting.  It was a children’s book, Fly Away Home, by Eve Bunting that really caused me to understand schema in a deep way.   We talked about airports, what people do in airports, if we had ever been to an airport, what we expect to see at an airport, why people go to airports, what type of people you see at airports.  We talked about the bathrooms, how big they are.  We just spent days and days talking about airports.  As soon as we got into the book and the students realized those people were living in the airport, you could just see them connect with the book.  We had built the schema for airports.  We talked about the fact that there were no beds and that they had to sleep sitting up in chairs and that they had to keep moving so they wouldn’t be noticed.  Last year we did Fly Away Home in two days. This year we spent two weeks on the book!

Emerging Themes for Deepening Reading Instruction
The themes that emerge from this transcription are examples of moving teaching from “good to memorable”.  The teacher’s thinking points to a deeper understanding of the schema strategy as well as a commitment to the importance of student talk about books.  Going deeper with texts over longer periods of time points to a reflective stance toward the teaching of reading comprehension.  Understanding student struggles, due to personal experiences of an adult struggling reader in a book club, seems simple, yet it is a complex set of feelings that insures teacher commitment to help all readers and close the gap.

Struggling as an adult reader offers a deeper understanding that can be carried over into teaching (that coincides with the adult learning segment in the Cornerstone Continuous Professional Development Model).  As an adult learner, we often forget what it feels like to be a learner and to be metacognitive about our learning.  It appears that reading to teach, the term coined by the quoted teacher, is a multifaceted approach that includes but is not limited to:

• reading books such as Reading for Meaning to build examples of  “how to deliver” reading content, strategies, and skills;
• practicing the language used by other teachers to describe strategies;
• scripting language that clearly defines the strategy or skill being taught;
• participating in adult learning experiences similar to the content taught; and
• reflecting as a learning community in and out of the classroom.

As we think about encouraging our students to read this summer, seizing the opportunity to insist on the same thing for the adult learners in our schools provides a way to move teaching from “good to memorable” and brings us one step closer to providing instruction that is likely to embrace all learners.

See below for online tools and examples to put this article into action !

Book Clubs