The Lit­tle Book Clubs that Could

By Vir­ginia McMillan

As the pro­fes­sional learn­ing chair for the Kawartha Pine Ridge Occa­sional Teacher Local, I am always try­ing to find new oppor­tu­ni­ties for our members.

The online book club is one of these: last year we had three online book clubs and we will do more this year.

Why do the club online? There are many rea­sons, includ­ing travel time and dis­tances, flex­i­bil­ity, home com­mit­ments, and weather. All of these were issues for our members.

Some­one has to be in charge of orga­niz­ing the book club, but in the club every­one is equal. As the orga­nizer I looked after the adver­tis­ing, obtain­ing the books, decid­ing on the day and time, and find­ing a good loca­tion for discussions.

I thought we had a good online loca­tion for the club – a free white­board – but only two of us could get onto the site at one time. We used another online loca­tion and were hav­ing a super dis­cus­sion when we were abruptly kicked off because of a time limit.

Our first book was Class­room Man­age­ment that Works by Robert Marzano. Read­ings and ques­tions were assigned, we stayed on topic, and we accom­plished all we set out to do. Our main chal­lenge was our dis­cus­sion loca­tion, but we all felt the club was suc­cess­ful as we helped each other con­sider issues and gain new ideas to put in our arse­nal of class­room man­age­ment strategies.

In Jan­u­ary, I adver­tised once more and three dif­fer­ent mem­bers decided join me in the club. We chose The Arts Go to School, edited by David Booth and Masayuki Hachiya. We made it a five-week club; mem­bers were in charge of one art each. The ideas we devel­oped for music, visual arts, dance, drama, and media lit­er­acy were great and pro­vided a mar­velous boost to our teach­ing tools.

The biggest dif­fer­ence this time was our chat loca­tion: by using the tech­nique of invit­ing each other to one loca­tion, Google chat allowed all four of us to get on at the same time.

For the next club, four peo­ple were inter­ested in dis­cussing Mak­ing Math Hap­pen in the Pri­mary Years, pub­lished by ETFO. We all liked the ideas of math jour­nals, try­ing to incor­po­rate more lit­er­a­ture, and pro­mot­ing more math talk. We really improved our com­mu­ni­ca­tions by hav­ing a Google site where we could share and respond to each other’s ideas.

The guide­lines from the ETFO book club web­site were very user friendly and easy to adapt. I strongly rec­om­mend online book clubs – we had fun explor­ing dif­fer­ent ideas and mak­ing new ideas our own.

Vir­ginia McMil­lan is a mem­ber of the Kawartha Pine Ridge Occa­sional Teacher Local.