"Notice and Note" Book Club

At school, some teachers decided to start a book club for the text Notice & Note: Strategies for Close Reading, by Kylene Beers and Robert E. Probst (Heinemann, 2013).

I'm new to close reading, since it's a new requirement for Common Core State Standards and I'm new to CCSS!  I've started using close reading in my third grade class, using various resources I bought from Teachers Pay Teachers.  So far I've seen that my students are engaging in the reading and are able to access informational text that I wouldn't have thought possible.  It's rather time consuming, and I'm not fully confident in my ability to use this strategy, but I believe that increasing rigor and beginning to focus on reading closely at younger grades will help my students as they get older.  I realize that I was required to read closely, especially in college, but that no one ever taught me how to do it.  I have the strategies in my own mind for how to read, but I'm learning along with my students even now!

Anyway, it's winter break (almost over!!!) and we decided in our book club to read the first section, the questions the authors asked themselves, and come up with some talking points to meet with.  We want to read at home and spend the entire book club talking and discussing -- I'm all for that!!  I want to have rich discussions, with lots of disagreement, so we can all come to our own conclusions and walk away with our own interpretations that are flavored by each other's but aren't carbon copies.  Does that make sense?  I feel like lately the public discourse has turned into an attitude that if you don't agree with someone else 100%, you are insulting their intelligence, their beliefs, and their integrity.  This wasn't always so, was it?  And now people privately act like this on a wide range of issues, which I think is wholly inappropriate.  Lively discussions that can sometimes change someone's thinking to a 180 degree can absolutely happen, but more often we change slightly based on someone else's argument, and it makes our own thinking richer, it doesn't replace it.  I hope that our discussions are lively and fun, full of opinions and questions, and that we all walk away with deeper convictions and more energy to try new methods and strategies to reach all of our learners.

In my next post I will share my thoughts on each question in section 1 of the book.  Stay tuned!