Our questions:

·         How do you motivate reluctant strategies?

·         Which strategies are most important for all learners?

·         Which strategies most significantly increase comprehension?

·         How can we get our students to connect to print?

·         How can we get students to pay attention?

·         How can we get students to demonstrate their understanding with little work for teachers?

·         With so much diversity in our classrooms, how can we choose one novel?

·         How can we help students find ways to want to read, rather than see it as a chore?

We then considered what it FELT like to read books we couldn’t read easily and weren’t interested in (obscure philosophy):

·         Disconnected

·         Disengaged

·         Lost

·         How can I bluff?

·         Excruciating

·         Panic

·         Confidence eroded

·         Frustrated

·         Stupid

·         Distracted

·         Confused

·         Chaos (of words and ideas)

·         Angry

·         This is a waste of time!

We also pondered the most important question in these changing times:  why should students read the novel (instead of blogs, non-fiction, short stories, movies and so on):

·         Awareness of different perspectives

·         Ability to visualize

·         Awareness of the range of human nature

·         Awareness of situations

·         Experience “other”

·         Sense of history

·         Allows students to step out of egocentricity

·         Capacity for depth

·         Ambiguity allows for personal interpretation

·         Sustained thinking

·         Sense of story

·         Possibility to stretch as thinker

·         Food for imagination

·         Creates connections

·         Safe way to experience the range of emotions

·         Provides many entry points (can be read at a variety of levels)

·         Experience of rich language

And then we considered, given the enormous (and growing) diversity of learners in our classrooms, why should we read ONE novel?

·         Survival (ours)

·         To allow students to learn from and with each other

·         To teach common strategies and skills

·         To provide common language

·         To provide common experience

·         To allow equal access within diversity

·         To enrich the experience of all

Given that we agreed that reading novels is important and one novel is a rich way to create common and enriching experiences, how can we provide access for all learners?

·         Universal design (ramps)

·         Read aloud (and think aloud)

·         Provide book on tape (ipod)

·         Small groups (some read chapter alone, some with buddy, some with EA, parent, teacher)

·         Provide/create visual prompts

·         Progression:  chapter one together, chapter two, read some and students finish chapter silently (except for readers who continue with teacher). 

·         Be thoughtful about the level of noise in the classroom as students read

Below are some of the novels we are working with and our framework for thinking about them.  Please feel free to add your ideas.  We have just got started and have a lot left to do, but many hands make light work.  

Note:  I’ve used amazon.com to get short summaries of the novels and stories.