This post originally appeared on APLitHelp.com (#RIP).

Many of us in education have been talking about how disconnected our students seem in the 20-21 school year. Sadly, the overwhelming nature of external stressors has become system wide. Even our top students are feeling trauma start to take their motivation from them. But for years, as an on-level English teacher, a secondary ELA interventionist, and finally a literacy coach, I have been working with disengaged students almost exclusively. There are a ton of tricks I have up my sleeve that help reconnect learning passion for reading and writing and a way to deal with personal conflict, and one of them for the past 10 years has been book clubs.

I first understood the power of book clubs when I was taking a break from teaching for two years as I raised my newborn son. As the first in the generation of both my husband and I’s family to have a child, and the first of my friends, I felt alone a good portion of the time. A friend invited me to a once a month book club, and all of the sudden, I was hooked! I was talking books with actual adults, learning about the world through all of these little instruction manuals. I was reading tough, advanced stuff with intelligent people and, I believe to this day, it saved me from the loneliness of being a stay at home mom. 

When I returned to work, I was determined to implement book clubs as a way to re engage my high school students who had, after many years, come to HATE school class, writing, and reading. And it worked. Helping kids develop reading stacks, discussion skills, and writing lives proved that passing a state test ISN’T about direct test prep. It was about students choosing to be actively literate.

Fast forward to the beginning of this school year. I am a coach now, and like many coaches, we were asked to take on extra duties due to the pandemic. I was asked to please fill in and teach a remote AP Literature class!! Having never taught AP Literature, I was intimidated. But there was literally no one else left (trust me, they looked around!) So into the fray, into the last good fight I will ever know, I decided to live and die on what I do best…igniting literacy passion! Here is a map to how I made book clubs work in a completely asynchronous, remote AP Literature class, and how the students responded!  

Getting Ready: I made a list of about 100 books from AP book lists that are commonly Q3 suggestions. I also added some more contemporary titles that I felt were complex enough to do some deeper analysis, looking at award winning fiction, reviews, and on various AP Lit sites. I put a quick genre note on each one. Our first assignment was for every student to pick out a book from the list and make a helpful slide for our class slide deck that had study guide links, audio recordings, reviews, free PDFs, background information, ect. This isn’t the book they had to choose, but I wanted them to have a resource that they made and controlled that shared support to read good books. Every quarter, one assignment was to build a new slide for a new book on the list. We have the slides deck hyperlinked to the book club list for ease of access. As the year went on, students were encouraged to submit ideas to add to the list and I kept adding, too. 

I also spent time collecting trailers for movies of the books on my list, and these became their warm ups for the lessons. Watch the trailer and rate if this is a story that interests you and why or why not? If it was, I encouraged them to add it to a list of books they wanted to read on Goodreads. I wanted them to read like readers…finding stories and collecting “to read” piles like all the readers I know! 

Book Club 1: I let students pick anything that interested them from the list, encouraging them to work together but not pushing it. The lessons focused on their identity lenses. Each student thought about the various ways they see the world: a choir student, a brother, a football player, an African American, a woman. Those became their identity lenses. As they read, I asked that they keep a journal of Rudine S. Bishop’s “Windows, Mirrors, and Sliding Glass Doors” that they were noticing in the book and when they got together with their clubs, to share about this. I selected a pretty contemporary text to read myself  in order to show them how I made connections with a book, and how I used a book as a way to explore perspectives from different cultures. I asked kids to work in partnerships, but it didn’t have to be with an in-class student. It could be with an aunt, or a grandfather, or a best friend. I even embraced the study guides online. Trying to act like they don’t exist isn’t realistic, so instead, I showed them how to use these types of resources to EXTEND their thinking rather than to supplant it. They became nonfiction texts to challenge, change, or confirm their perspectives and interpretations.  We took four weeks to read the book, and when they finished, I gave them two past AP prompts to choose from and write their first formative Q3 essay using their book club book. A student shared this with me:

Book Club 2: For this one, I introduced one big idea that helps in college learners: forming successful study groups. Our goal this time was to really build their study groups muscles because I want them making meaning from books collaboratively. The lessons for this book club all focused on how to bring their A-game to clubs and find/deepen their thinking with interesting ideas. They still did identity work, like creating their textual lineages…a list of the books that have a special place in their development and why. But we complicated it by teaching them about  What, Why and How questions and Factual, Inferential, and Universal Questions. 

I had them sign up for Zoom coaching sessions as a book club, where I would offer their club three choices: 

1. What help did they want so they can excel at bookclubs? Do they want me to appreciate their club (watch for what is going well and report back), coach their club (give them pointers here and there as I saw an opportunity), or evaluate their club (give them feedback on how deep or effective their conversation was). 
2. What way can I give feedback? Stop their talk and give them advice in the moment, type something in chat for them to consider or try, or watch and take notes with my camera off and then talk to them after they finished. 
3. What did they want this to focus on? Depth of thought? Engaging questions? Power imbalances in the club? The work in this book club was less about the book, and more about the ability for them to self-manage and see this work as a way to have intellectual talk about ANYTHING! For this club’s grade, I asked them to submit a video of them discussing how they might use this book to answer one of two different Q3 prompts.

Here is some feedback from a student who was transferred out of my class due to pandemic switching. I loved it because she is choosing to continue reading complex literature on her own, and in my mind, that is what I want for her! 

Book Club 3: This book club’s focus would be to read outside of their book in some way. We grounded this work in critical lenses. We learned about how reading with THREE lenses (1 critical lens, 1 identity/reader response lens, and 1 formalist lens) can give us deeper insights. We learned how to separate where our insights came from and deconstruct how we process a book on multiple levels so that they could improve their writing (which might benefit from an outside lens) AND their multiple choice questions, which needed them to be more text focused with their formalist lens. Reading with a formalist lens means sticking to the text, thinking about at least 1 element of the book as being the complex element. I taught them that great books had at least one complicated element that really made it stand out. 

• Station 11 has a complicated plot and conflict
• Fight Club has a complicated narrative point of view
• Cloud Atlas has a very complicated setting
• Lord of the Flies had very complicated symbolism and motifs
• Canterbury Tales was a very complex style and tone
• The Great Gatsby was complicated because of its characters. 

They started tracking these six big elements in their book club texts to try to figure out how they work together to create complex themes. They also used their textual lineages and their new book club titles to add a page to their online portfolios. I intend to use this at the end of the year as a review. 

I uploaded pre-recorded read alouds/think alouds in the novella I was reading (The Awakening) as a demo for different critical lenses as well: gender/feminist, marxist/social power lens, psychoanalytical, biographical, new historical/cultural, and archetypal. Once they were exposed to a beginning understanding of these, each student chose a critical lens to use with their book. They researched about their lenses and found questions that could go with them. They also did additional reading using their preferred lens, whether that required them to read author biographies, history from the time period, psychological theories. Because they got to pick, they had a fun time becoming experts. Clubs ended up having people with different critical lenses, and the discussions were so interesting as everyone brought a different flavor to the table. They were asked to put together a one pager for their book that incorporated the thinking from their critical lens, their formalist analysis, and their identity lens. I received this feedback from a student:

Book Club 4: This time I decided to push harder into a note-taking process because this sounded like the biggest hang up kids had about reading…annotating long texts was seen as TORTURE! But by now, I was hoping they were ready for a new way of thinking about annotation. We made three kinds of entries into our journals: quick notes (fast impression and ideas they are picking up as they read, dialectical notes, ect), connected notes, (when we review the quick notes and look for patterns related to how a text is developing the various literary elements), and synthesizing notes (basically a one pager that visualizes the overall thematic messages that are created by the interplay of the literary elements.) They had access to a slides deck that showed them examples of these kinds of notebook pages from past students, and were encouraged to invent their own processes. One student wrote to me about a way to track changes over time he had invented. He was so excited!

 I modeled this work with “The Metamorphosis” which I had them read in place of assigned short stories and poetry. This way, they could see me creating these notes along with the novella, and apply the thinking to their own book.  This is the ONLY long text that I made the class read this year. But I didn’t pick it because “we always do Metamorphosis” or it was a part of the curriculum. Curriculum is the standards we teach; no books are our curriculum. Since I was going to make them read this book, I considered how relevant it was to THIS group of kids, how well they can tackle it, and if it was something they might enjoy. Since we are remote, I also had to think about accessibility: I had to find something they could all get their hands on and that was short enough to allow them to also read their book club texts.  I considered the fact that we are all pretty isolated in our remote homes, which reminded me of Gregor, and I did a quick survey over genres, and the overwhelming majority liked dystopia. So our overarching question was, “What are the characteristics that are common in dystopias that make them so fun to read?”  We made our central purpose for reading this novella two fold: Could this book be considered dystopian, and what does Kafka tell us from the past that can apply to us now in the pandemic? I gave them a smaller choice of their book club texts this time (Invisible Man, Frankenstein, 1984, Brave New World, Lord of the Flies, Things Fall Apart, The Road, Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep, and Fahrenheit 451) and created a guided slides deck for each of the texts I chose that walked them through some deeper themes. They had a great time trying to decide if their books had dystopian elements!  The slide deck was the final product their group turned in, including an essay that shared their opinion on how Metamorphosis applies to our current pandemic world. The responses were so insightful! Here is some feedback from a student about the note taking processes he was making up for his own study. 

Book Club 5:  In this book club, I wanted to give them a little more work thinking about complicated characters and plots, and how they work together to create amazing character arcs. We watched this video Character Arcs and Theme from Youtube’s The Art of Story. This walks them through how complicated analysis of characters and plot together create a dynamic thematic understanding. I cannot recommend a video more!! I learned a ton and so did they. For this group, we went back to open choice, but I suggested reading a bildungsroman that I could guarantee had a strong arc. For this club, they needed to use all of the previous skills to create a complex portrait of how the character and plot influence one another in ways that teach us big universal lessons about life. I did not use any demo with this unit, since I thought the video did a fine job, and this semester I want book clubs operating as independently of me as possible. 

For their attendance, I asked them to share notes from what they are working on in clubs, and also they got a new tool that they filled in that is called My Daily Work Plan. This is a Google form where they share with me their learning plans for how they will attack their work, what times that are taking to do certain pieces, and what they hope to accomplish from their studies. We are working more with the learning standards and they are required to do self-analysis on their learning targets using the AP Standards as well. They use the knowledge statements to come up with interesting annotations as they read and talk about their ideas and questions. Students had all options open for how they presented their thinking…podcasts, videos of book club discussions, slides, one pagers, essays. They all chose what they wanted to do with the skills I assigned them from Essential Understandings 1 and 3. I received this feedback from a student. 

Book Club 6: In this book club, we studied the interplay between narrative point of view and setting. I recommended clubs pick fiction that is set in a real time and place, as the genre to study. For this club, the work surrounded Essential Understandings 2 and 4. The clubs worked on creating what I called a “legacy book” that is a collection of slides that capture the setting through pictures, music, poems, short stories, etc, demonstrate how their book clubs processed what they read through the use of other fiction and nonfiction written from different perspectives on the same time/place/period, and we also focused on how book clubs communicate deeply again. I thought the perfect model texts for this work would be “The Things They Carried” since it shows multiple perspectives from American soldiers in the Vietnam War,  and “The Sympathizer” because it shows a perspective from a Vietnamese soldier.  I modeled thinking through these complex ideas with a couple chapters of each book. I wanted to make sure they understood how really deep, enriched conversations happen. I also wanted to have them think about how the same event, viewed through different eyes, can teach different lessons. This was all about coming together to co-create meaning. I am not sure what the products will look like, or what feedback I will recieve, because we are in this book club right now! 

Book Club 7: My next book club will actually be a Shakespearean movie club. I have found 5 plays on Youtube, Globe, and Stratford Festival that I want them to pick from (Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear.) My goal for this unit is to dive deep into Essential Understanding 5 and 6 by doing an author’s craft study over his Style and Tone, and Symbolism and Motifs. I am not making them read these entire plays. They are supposed to watch the plays, and find three scenes that meet the criteria I spell out for them to analyze in a close read. 

1. They will pick a scene that they felt was a really important turning point for a character to analyze for literal and figurative meaning, focusing on the overall text, stage directions, and setting. 
2. Then, they will pick a scene where they feel like there was some interesting character conflict (within himself or with another character) and do an analysis over the dialogue, thinking about the text, the subtext, and the context for each line. 
3. The final scene has to be where they think everything is coming to a head, a big climatic moment. For this scene, I want to have them analyze the artistic ways Shakespeare provided enough entertainment value that makes his works still survive half a millenia later. Through set-ups and payoffs, how does Shakespeare incentivize his audience to co-construct meaning with him in a way that helps us get emotionally invested?

 I also plan on having the groups come together to make a Shakespeare Style Guide for how to write like Shakespeare by combining their insights from reading several works to look for commonalities. I think I will be using a Padlet for this! 

Book Club 8: And here we are: My final book club of the year. This is going to be TOTALLY hands off for me. No rules, no suggested activities, no guidance on picking a book from my list. I want them to read whatever they want! I want them to form their own clubs with anyone around any book or subject. My only guidance will be to request a reflective writing piece on how they have used some of the skills they learned this year to create their own learning experiences. To reflect on using recursive notes, conversation strategies, questions, literary elements, lenses, and reading around the book to create meaningful, entertaining experiences around learning and books. My goal is to push them out of the nest and see if they can fly before I send them off into the wilderness alone. 

This is the main reason I wanted to do book clubs with advanced readers. YES, they do learn a lot from us about specific books when we “teach titles.” But then, do they continue being readers? When I did a little informal questioning of several adult readers I know, the general response was no. Most adults found that they read less as a result of their English classes, at least for a few years. They had to recover a love for reading. Almost everyone I spoke to talked about a reading for pleasure gap between high school and adulthood, myself included. 

I want my students to run out of my class into the waiting arms of great books that they could unlock without me; I hope they choose to engage in literate behaviors, not just to get smarter, but because it is fun and emotionally rewarding! This feedback from a student tells me that the work we are doing is important enough to try!



Am I going to be successful? I sure hope so! So far our progress checks are great, and the feedback from students has been very positive. Not only this, but we will have read 9 long texts this year! But if I have taken one thing away from this pandemic, it is this. We cannot keep teaching the same books, the same way, every year. We have to make changes. I have to learn and grow as a teacher/coach if I want my students to learn and grow. I have to trust them to be terrible at something that is hard, and trust myself that I can help them get better at it! I am loving this year, and even if I never meet my students in person, I feel like I know them more personally because I let them bring themselves to the table; I center my work around them rather than the literature. This year challenged, changed, and confirmed a lot for me. I just hope more teachers can join me, because this feels exactly like what I always hoped teaching would feel like! 

Stefanie Garcia from Fort Worth, Texas is finishing her 15th year in education. After graduating from Texas Tech, she worked as a social worker, and then at 30 changed careers to become a teacher and worked in the Fort Worth area teaching English classes 1-4. I am a North Star of Texas Writing Project teacher, and my focus was studying how to work on change within large school systems to improve literacy outcomes. She earned my Masters as a reading specialist from University of Texas, Arlington and worked as a reading interventionist for high school students prior to being a literacy coach, where she now work with teachers in 7th-12th to support them as they plan engaging work for our students using our standards as our guiding light. 

Feature Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash