Tags
Nerdy Book Club Session at NCTE
This afternoon, there will be a session entitled Relevance, Relationships, and Reading Lives: Fostering Reading Engagement in All Readers. Whether you’re in Boston for NCTE with the potential to join us or if you’re at home and wondering what you’re missing, we thought that Nerdy Book Club readers might appreciate a peek at what we are planning to share.
Donalyn Miller
We can spend hours determining what students should know and be able to do, and crafting instruction to accomplish the desired results, but without including students rights’ to an engaging, trustworthy, risk-free place in which to learn, what we teach will always fall short. Australian researcher, Brian Cambourne (1995), identifies the following factors, which contribute to successful learning circumstances:
-
Immersion- Students need to be surrounded with books of all kinds and be given the opportunity to read them every day. Conversations about reading— what is being read and what students are getting from their books—need to be an ongoing event
-
Demonstrations- Students require abundant demonstrations in the structure and features of texts, how to use texts for different learning goals, and how to access the information in them.
-
Expectations- Students have personal goals for their academic and personal literacy development. Teachers should set meaningful expectations for reading and writing.
-
Responsibility- Students need to make at least some of their own choices when pursuing learning goals. As Cambourne states, “Learners who lose the ability to make choices become disempowered.”
-
Employment- Students need the time to practice what they are learning within the context of realistic situations.
-
Approximations- Students need to receive encouragement for the skills and knowledge they do have and be allowed to make mistakes as they work towards mastery.
-
Response- Students need nonthreatening, immediate feedback on their progress.
-
Engagement- Even with all of the other conditions in place, Cambourne identifies engagement as the most important condition for learning which must exist in a classroom. Reading must be an endeavor that:
-
Has personal value to students
-
Students see themselves as capable of doing
-
Is free from anxiety
-
Is modeled by someone they like, respect, trust, and want to emulate
Students must have buy-in, believing that they can read and that reading is worth learning how to do well. We have to build a community that embraces every student and provides acceptance and encouragement no matter where students are on the reading curve.
Colby Sharp and Jenni Holm
Straight to the Source: Skyping with Authors in an Elementary Classroom
Connecting readers to author and illustrators can provide students will reading memories that will last a lifetime. We will share five ways to effectively connect young readers to their favorite authors and illustrators.
Teri Lesesne
Facilitating Engagement in an Online Environment
Keeping us all connected when there is no time for face-to-face meetings is a problem I have been tackling for several hers since our MLS program went to an online format. How can I develop the same sort of community and engagement as I did when I met students in a FTF format? My part of the session will focus on creating community and engagement in an online environment. We will look at apps, websites, and assignments that help create a sense of community even under these circumstances. The PowerPoint from the presentation can be found here: www.slideshare.net/professornana/
Kellee Moye
Katherine Sokolowski
Using Reading Conferences to Increase Student Engagement
Conferring with readers in our classroom is an important component to any reading workshop program. My portion of our session will show how I moved from struggling to find the “right way” to confer, to giving up conferences for some time, to my classroom today. I will share what I have learned along the way about reading conferences and how they can create engagement in your readers. I use conferring to build connections between students, between students and authors, and between students and myself. Reading conferences went from being the worst part of my day to what is now my favorite.
You can find my presentation at http://www.slideshare.net/katsok
Cindy Minnich
Building Reading Habits through Student Reflection and Goal-Setting
The reading lives of students change over time and even the ones who were avid readers before will need help adjusting to each new stage of their lives so that they can build and maintain their reading habits outside of our classrooms. We can help students recognize the effects of those changes – to their time, to their interests, to their development as readers – so they can learn how to adjust their reading lives in a way that keeps them reading.
You can find my presentation at http://www.slideshare.net/cbethm
Last year, the Nerdy Book Club presentation was one of the HIGHGLIGHTS of NCTE for me! I left feeling so energized and motivated with lots of great ideas. This year I’m not at NCTE. 😦 I will definitely check out the info that’s been posted and watch the twitter feed. Have fun! I’ll be there next year! I can’t wait!! Happy Presenting!
What a gift! Thank you for sharing all of this with us. I have been struggling with my practice this year, it was quite a blow when I learned I would not be able to attend NCTE (ironically taking place just 2 hours away from me this year), so I am incredibly grateful for these resources. I am having the kind of teaching year where I feel I have lost my compass and have less time to connect online, so NCTE was going to provide much needed inspiration. Thank you for posting your presentations here. Have a fantastic time!
That’s too bad you can’t be here! Make time for Twitter over the coming days – you’ll see tweets from sessions and links to reflections on blogs that can’t take the place of being here, but they can give you a chance to learn vicariously. Most will be marked with the #ncte13 hashtag. Hopefully some searching there will bring you enough inspiration to refuel you!
I wish I could be there this year! Will be at Miami Book Fair instead – I’ll be thinking of all my Nerdy friends – have a blast!
Thank you so much, everyone!
You guys were the best today. Your thoughtful and practical advice for getting kids invested in reading through building real relationships around books was just the medicine I needed. I’ve been stalking you all online for years and had shivers being in the room with my friends who don’t even know they’re my friends this afternoon. Thank you for sharing yourselves with us!
My kids are starting off their Book Clubs with a “Book Tasting.” Each child brings 1 to 3 books that they read and liked and want to loan to their friends. They give each book a plug and then they exchange books. My 6th grader just did this book club with her friends and she was worried no one would want her books (Catch Rider and My Almost Epic Summer). They did! And then the girls baked homemade apple pie. It was really fun! She took home The Green Glass Sea and The Book Thief. My 3rd grade son will do this same book club in Dec. Hope it goes well too (I’m hosting!).
Pingback: NCTE and ALAN: Hardly Relaxing but Always Rejuvenating PART I | Charting By the Stars