Book Clubs That Build 21st Century Skills

Breathe new life into book clubs and place students at the center of their reading experience.

G. FAITH LITTLE
Initiative Director, 21st Century Learning
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Time moves forward, as it always does. We can take this time to reflect on lessons learned when we unexpectedly and quickly shifted from teaching in the classroom, to teaching remotely, and then into a next normal of blended in-person and virtual learning spaces. One big takeaway from this time of critical reflection is that we aren’t starting with a blank page. Whatever the season, we can adapt tools we already have to meet the challenges we’re facing.

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Breathing new life into book clubs 

New tools can breathe new life into our planning and our teaching, and creating a new tool doesn’t need to be done from scratch. By connecting Ten Tips for Successful Book Clubs with our Global Mindset Framework, we can quickly create a new resource that integrates teaching 21st century skills into each reading opportunity we plan for our students. 
 
Book clubs offer many benefits to student readers, including:

• Promoting a love for literature and a positive attitude toward reading
• Reflecting a student-centered model of literacy (employing a gradual release of responsibility)
• Encouraging extensive and intensive reading
• Inviting natural discussions that lead to student inquiry and critical thinking
• Supporting diverse responses to text
• Fostering interaction, cooperation, and collaboration
• Providing choice and encourage responsibility
• Exposing students to literature from multiple perspectives
• Nurturing reflection and self-evaluation

A successful book club for your students will:

• Generate excitement
• Create opportunities for shared decision-making
• Communicate expectations
• Establish ground rules
• Offer opportunities to lead by example
• Gather tools
• Anticipate tough conversations
• Be student-centered
• Celebrate completion
• Tweak what you’ve already tried

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Understanding the Global Mindset Framework

​Now that we’ve framed some of the characteristics of book clubs, we can connect each facet to our Global Mindset Framework. This will help us streamline our work when planning for our next book club iteration, or beginning a book club community with our students.

The Global Mindset Framework is the articulation of 21st century skills students need to navigate their present and their future, sorted into five categories of capacities: caring, collaborative, creative, critical, and global. The framework addresses key questions that teachers and school leaders struggle with as they attempt to make key concepts relevant to children in a changing world. 

To understand the Global Mindset Framework, we can look to the Global Learning Alliance (GLA). The GLA is the outgrowth of our groundbreaking research on the features and practices surrounding 21st century teaching and learning. It has evolved from the seeds of a research project and is now a consortium of schools and universities around the world dedicated to understanding, defining, applying, and sharing the principles and practices of a world-class education within a wide range of educational contexts. 

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21st century capacities

​Global capacity: The capacity for students to step outside the confines of their own familiar social world to understand distant realities in order to engage productively with the world. 

Critical capacity: The capacity for students to develop their full critical cognitive capacities in order to be discerning and informed citizens of the world.

Collaborative capacity: The capacity for students to develop habits of observation, reflection, and collaboration, and to be able to communicate in multiple modalities such as through images, words, sounds, gestures, or an integration of these modes in order to actively contribute to various discourses in the world. 

Creative capacity: The capacity for students to follow their curiosity by questioning or imagining in order to contribute positive improvements or inventions to their world.

Caring capacity: The capacity for students to explore compassion, empathy, and self-awareness in order to develop caring partnerships with themselves, their communities, countries, and world. 

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Activating 21st century skills

​Using the template below, we can imagine how we might combine various capacities from the Global Mindset Framework with our tips for success to generate a profile of a book club that integrates 21st century skills into student learning. We want to keep moving our teaching forward to meet the needs of today’s students, but we don’t often feel we have the time we need to recreate our plans. By layering the Global Mindset Framework over our book club planning, we can revise what we’ve already got going for us instead of starting from a blank page.

Book club component	21st century skills
Generate excitement	Global: Students engage in multiple perspectives by writing about what life might be like in [setting] for [characters].
Shared decision-making	Global: Students engage in real-world problem-solving by choosing from a list of short stories about bias.
Communicate expectations	Collaborative: Students generate effective and varied ways for expectations to be communicated so that all participants can be reached. ​Caring: Students consider the needs of each group member as they work.
Establish ground rules	Critical: Students write a response to established ground rules, sharing how they think each one supports a positive experience for themselves or their classmates and/or how a rule might be improved.
Lead by example	Caring: Students develop self-awareness by observing their teacher’s model of a transparent reading practice and making a personal connection.
Gather tools	Critical: Students evaluate which reading tools, templates, or conversation guides were most effective for them in the past. Collaborative: Book club groups agree upon which tools to use or how to use all tools to benefit all members.
Anticipate tough conversations	Creative: Student facilitators imagine some issues that might come up during their conversations. Facilitators share their issues on a Google doc and comment on one another’s issue, jotting down questions or comments they might have ready to share.
Keep it student-centered	Collaborative: Students collaborate strategically by rotating roles during book club conversations. Teachers observe and provide an opportunity for students to reflect on their group’s progress and challenges.
Celebrate completion	Caring: Students develop self-confidence by sharing something that they learned and want to build on.
Sharing ideas	​Global: With teachers from all over the world connecting more easily and more often than ever, consider how you can share your ideas and get ideas from your colleagues in other communities, near and far.

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Connecting skills to next steps

​Using the template above, we can customize our profile to fit a specific book — in this case, we'll use Malala Yousafzai's I Am Malala: How One Girl Stood Up for Education and Changed the World. In this model, we start with our to-do list; we imagine some of our options, and what we need to collect to complete our plan.

21st century skills (from above)	Next steps
Global: Students engage in multiple perspectives by writing about what life might be like in [setting] for [characters].	Students write on the following prompt: An announcement is made today that all girls will no longer be able to attend school, starting tomorrow. What does the day after tomorrow look like? Who is impacted, and how are they affected?
Global: Students engage in real-world problem-solving by choosing from a list of short stories about bias.	Compile 3-5 short stories. Distribute packet. Students choose one story to read prior to starting the book.
Collaborative: Students generate effective and varied ways for expectations to be communicated so that all participants can be reached. ​Caring: Students consider the needs of each group member as they work.	Students create a Google Doc for discussion roles & expectations. Within the doc, each student comments on at least one expectation, noting one benefit and identifying who is affected. Students are invited to suggest improvements to the list.
Critical: Students write a response to established ground rules, sharing how they think each one supports a positive experience for themselves or their classmates and/or how a rule might be improved.	Students create a Google Doc for ground rules. Within the doc, each student comments on at least one ground rule, noting an advantage and a potential challenge. Students are invited to suggest improvements to the list.
Caring: Students develop self-awareness by observing their teacher’s model of a transparent reading practice and making a personal connection.	Read aloud a short story on bias, showing how you annotate as you read. Write, in real time, on the prompt above and invite students to share low-inference observations about what you did.
Critical: Students evaluate which reading tools, templates, or conversation guides were most effective for them in the past. Collaborative: Book club groups agree upon which tools to use or how to use all tools to benefit all members.	Students review the tools they’ve collected in their virtual binders over the past few months. Groups use a decision-making protocol to agree upon the tool or tools they will use for this book club.
Creative: Student facilitators imagine some issues that might come up during their conversations. Facilitators share their issues on a Google doc and comment on one another’s issue, jotting down questions or comments they might have ready to share.	​Build in time for facilitators to meet together for this step, and provide feedback on their ideas to support possible tough conversations.
Collaborative: Students collaborate strategically by rotating roles during book club conversations. Teachers observe and provide an opportunity for students to reflect on their group’s progress and challenges	Utilize a sticky note protocol for student reflection. Do this more than once during the unit — consider a pre- and post-reading reflection.
Caring: Students develop self-confidence by sharing something that they learned and want to build on.	Broadcast / forecast share-out using the prompts: one thing I learned while reading this book and one thing I want to do based on what I learned.
​Global: With teachers from all over the world connecting more easily and more often than ever, consider how you can share your ideas and get ideas from your colleagues in other communities, near and far.	Reach out to colleagues — within your school community, those you've met through PD opportunities, or those you've connected with virtually over the past year — and share how you're each dealing with challenging conversations.

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The task before us all is to educate students today for the world they’re poised to lead tomorrow, and as we recognize that we can no longer sustain a 20th century in a 21st century world, we must remain flexible in order to meet the dynamic needs of our students. As we look for ways to build upon the expertise and techniques already alive in our classrooms, we can easily create opportunities for students to build 21st century skills, shifting from teacher-centered instruction to an environment that puts students at the center of their reading and writing experiences. 
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UNPACK CHALLENGING TEXTS

GLOBAL MINDSET FRAMEWORK

LEVERAGING LITERACY AT HOME