at the end

I wrote in my last post, many moons ago, that I was never going to do another novel study with my students again. I haven’t. However, I did use two novels as conrnerstones for our recent foray into poetry in the Reading and Writing Workshops. Those two novels, both by Sharon Creech, were Love that Dog and Hate that Cat.

These novels were read aloud and enjoyed as stories. They were supported by frequent poetry read-alouds and many bins full of poetry anthologies I had borrowed from the public library. We worked through a series of mini-lessons on approaching poems, looking for symbols, understanding mood, poetic language, etc.

A few things have changed in my classroom since my second revelation about novel studies. One is that I have fully embraced and implemented the workshop framework to literacy instruction; the second is that the students in my class and I sit in a circle, rather than at desks, to discuss the things we do through the course of learning to be better readers and writers.

The second change has had a tremendous impact on the feel and camaraderie in the classroom. I have worked tirelessly before to engage the classes that have come and gone in community building activities to dissolve those tightly held ideas about our differences [and our similarities, more so] that keep us from enjoying one another fully. I think I understand now that the steel and wood structures we hold between us do more to support those biases, fears, and prejudices than we can imagine. Moving into a circle everyday, sitting face-to-face with everyone and nothing to hide behind two or more times a day, has done more to build community in three months than I have been able to accomplish in a year’s worth of work before. Is it the kids this year, or is it the structure, I’ll see next year.

Anyway, relevant tangents aside: reading these two novels aloud, and back to back, was awesome. I set no expectations for the discussions, except that if the novel were starting to leave the room, I would intervene and gently nudge them back into the centre of the discussion. I did this by using an invested discussion strategy I learned from Frank Serafini. It is all about having the students respond by entering the conversation where they feel comfortable and making comments about what they noticed/enjoyed/connected to/wondered/predicted/realized/etc. I took myself out of the centre of the conversation. I stopped playing gate-keeper. It was very cool to experience these young people engaging in a conversation about a book that they all enjoyed on their own terms. There were no assignments on the novel coming up, no reports, and no comprehension questions to answer afterward. They were releived of the pressure to perform, and perform they did. And by using my experience and knowledge as a reader, I was able to guide the conversation when it got tangential, and revive it when it faltered, but I became one voice in the converstaion, not the voice.

Next time, I think I won’t even sit in the circle, I’m going to step out and take notes from outside.