Book Club Plus: Organising Your Literacy Curriculum to Bring Students to High Levels of Literacy

Sit in any staff room or teachers' lounge in the Australia or the United States and it's likely you'll hear teachers talking about the urgent needs of their students and the ever-increasing demands of the curriculum. Teaching today seems far more complex than in the past, particularly in the area of literacy instruction. From public debates to legislative sessions at state and federal levels, from school staff meetings to news articles, and from parent-teacher meetings to conversation with Curriculum Officers, recommendations abound to respond to the question: "How can we teach all children to read?' Experts from many quarters offer teachers a veritable bazaar of solutions--guided reading, early intervention, literature-based instruction ... the list continues. However, more than any other stakeholders in education, teachers know that no single approach, no simple solution will lead all students to high levels of literacy. Yet, teachers also recognise that defaulting to an eclectic patchwork of approaches fails to give students or teachers a coherent, shared experience of literacy as a cultural tool for thought and communication. Effective literacy instruction is complex. Practice must be planned yet adaptable, responsive to learners' diversity and changing needs, integrative across the curriculum, and accountable to many, sometimes-competing goals. Given this view of practice, teacher development in the form of skills training and information updates does not afford practitioners the opportunity to learn as flexible, inventive problem-solvers (Spiro, Feltovich, Jacobson, & Coulson, 1992). Teachers and teacher educators need to make sense of a dizzying array of problems and solutions. To do this they need principled conceptual frameworks to guide their thought and action. Our article describes one such framework, Book Club Plus, designed by a practitioner inquiry network called the Teachers' Learning Collaborative. Working together to design Book Club Plus The issue of how to keep children engaged once they have learned to read is a challenging one for teachers. When students reach the middle years, unless they are committed, as well as fluent, readers, they can easily begin to struggle as the text demands of the curriculum increase. To learn to read well, all students need to read thought-provoking, age-appropriate books. They also need to respond thoughtfully to these books in talk, writing, and as they read other texts. Insuring these opportunities--ones designed to promote confidence in reading strategically and ownership of literacy practices--was the aim of the original Book Club program (see Raphael, Pardo, & Highfield, 2002). That framework illustrated ways to organise a literature-based literacy curriculum and engage students in meaningful reading, writing, and peer-led talk about text. Yet, important as this learning is, independent, self-regulated readers also must learn and practice a myriad of skills and strategies at their instructional level. The variation in classrooms is wide, with students who are reading below, at, or beyond grade level within the same classroom. Readers who are struggling in particular need intensive instructional support, using texts that are at their instructional level. A dilemma facing teachers is how to accomplish both goals: (a) engaging their diverse readers in meaningful activities around age-appropriate text that they may not be able to read independently but can still engage with through response in writing and through talk, and (b) providing instruction appropriate to each student's individual needs--even if the texts at their instructional level are meant for younger students. Our goal in designing the Book Club Plus framework was to manage this dilemma (Lampert, 1985) so that all youngsters read with teacher support at their instructional level, as well as practice comprehension skills and strategies in conversation and writing in response to age-appropriate literature. …