Overall Reflection

Reading Skills
I was working with a group of strong, motivated readers. The reading skills I needed to address were different than skills I might address if I was working with a group still struggling with basic comprehension. Because the students began the year with high reading comprehension, I had to make decisions about what higher level reading skills I might address with them. Effective discussion is a skill that many adults, even adults who are avid readers, have not mastered. It is a skill that encourages deeper analysis not only of a text, but also of one's own beliefs. Furthermore, the process of being able to compile information, distill it into "Big Ideas," and communicate those ideas effectively is one that will serve students well in an astonishing range of future endeavors. Even though these students are high-level readers, they needed a great deal of scaffolding and direct instruction to lift the level of their talk in discussions, so I do think choosing to focus on discussion skills was an effective way to lift the level of their work.

Growing Ideas through Collaboration
Students growing up in a society that favors individualism over collectivism are acculturated from a very early age to take ownership of their work. One of the first things they learn to write is their name, and one of the first ways we ask them to use this learning is to label work they have done with their name. Even as a fifth grade teacher, I spend a large portion of the school year asking students to put their name on their work. To successfully grow ideas in a book club, however, students must relinquish ownership of their ideas and offer them up to be part of the collective good. I realized the contradiction inherent in what I was asking students to do, and a major part of this work became about helping students to understand and move past this contradiction. By the end of this work, though the path might not have been exactly what I originally intended, students did come up with original thinking, grown out of discussions that were truly collaborative.

Encouraging Student Reflection
This work entailed a great deal of student reflection and self-analysis. Honest, thoughtful introspection is a skill that is not easy to develop but that has major implications for future success in virtually all arenas. I hadn't planned to incorporate so much self-reflection in this work, but I realized that in order to teach into what students were doing, I needed to gather evidence in the form of their own reflections. It was difficult for them to separate their process from the work itself, and often when my intention was to have the students comment on what they were doing or thinking as they wrote post - its, or what kind of information they looked for as they read, students would comment on the content of the text. Teaching them to be reflective about their work process independently of the content became an important secondary objective in this work.

Using a Wiki as a Collaboration Tool
In the book Literacy Moves On (2005), Janet Evans discusses the "Changing Nature of Literacy in the Twenty-First Century." She discusses the different literacy skills students draw upon as they become more adept at using technology in order to communicate. I had two motivations for using a wiki for this project. One was to encourage development of online communication skills. The next was to create a shared space that would encourage collaboration and growth of new thinking. What was interesting is that the wiki did support student work, but not in the way in which I had envisioned. I envisioned the growth of new ideas taking place on the wiki itself as students released their ideas into the online collective space. However, the true development of new ideas happened in the discussions themselves, with the wiki serving as a place for students to collect evidence and support their thinking. I will continue to use a wiki in the future to guide book talks, but I might approach it in a different way.

Another benefit of using a wiki is that it became a valuable assessment tool. It enabled me to track each groups' conversations simultaneously and assess how they were progressing toward the outlined skills without recording and transcribing conversations.

Implications for Professional Development
I learned a great deal about myself as a teacher and about the art of book discussions doing this work. There are many ways in which this work has influenced and will continue to influence my teaching. While reflecting on this process as a whole, I realized that the first cycle was really about gathering data in order to truly understand what it is that my students knew about book talks and what they were able to do. I needed to create several opportunities to study what they were doing in order to really understand where they were in their discussion process. Doing this work underscored for me that data collection and time for thoughtful teacher reflection are two crucial elements of effective teaching.

Additionally, I realized how important explicit instruction is in helping students to develop any new skill. I needed to be very clear with my students about what skills I was trying to help them to grow, and I needed to be specific in how exactly they could develop these skills. Further, I needed to balance these skills with plenty of opportunities for them to implement what they had learned through the direct instruction. This cycle of direct instruction and opportunity for guided practice comes directly from the workshop model explained by Lucy Calkins in The Art of Teaching Reading and developed throughout her other work and the work of many other educators. I do use the workshop model in my classroom, but this work helped me to further understand just how explicit my instruction needed to be, and how to tailor it in order to more effectively communicate how students could strengthen their work.

I plan to use this work not only for my own growth, but for professional development of others. I have been asked to give a workshop on this work after several teachers observed my class and marveled at the depth with which the students were communicating with each other. When I present this work, what I really plan to emphasize is the process itself, not the end result. The process of learning to be an effective communicator in a book discussion is not necessarily linear, and it can be messy. I will encourage teachers to try this work in their own book clubs in order to deepen their understanding of how difficult this work can be and how concretely they need to scaffold the process to move their students toward success.