7 Secrets to Engaging Novel Studies

[00:00:00] Julie Kuntz: Hi there, my name is Julie Kuntz and I am one of the professional learning specialists at Teaching Channel. I am super excited to share with you today’s mini webinar topic, which is Seven Secrets to Engaging Novel Studies. So before I worked with Teaching Channel, I was a seventh grade middle school language arts and communications teacher, and I spent years really cultivating and developing my practice around novel studies.

[00:00:26] So today’s topic is all about some of the things I learned along the way through developing novel studies and some ways to make your next novel study exciting, engaging, and dynamic.

[00:00:41] So there are many different tips and tricks around engaging novel studies. Today, I selected seven different ideas for you to think about when you’re developing your next novel study, and I’m going to talk about each of those individually. So the first one on the list. is to really consider text selection.

[00:01:02] This arguably is one of the most important aspects of developing an engaging novel study. The text selections need to be interesting and relatable and relevant to the reader. to your students. Emphasis on the your students part. I know when I started out teaching novel studies there were a couple of books that I just loved.

[00:01:24] And I always told myself, when I become a teacher, I am going to teach. But by the time I became an actual teacher, the books that I loved with all of my heart were maybe not so relevant or current for the students that were in front of me. So I think it’s really important to always keep our students in the forefront of our minds when we’re thinking about what types of texts they might like.

[00:01:47] And as much as we might love a book, it might not land in the same way with our students. And then the other tidbit about text selection that I think is really important is making ourselves aware that text selections are dynamic. And what I mean by that is, is that texts are always growing, evolving, and changing in the same way that our students are.

[00:02:08] And so we might have an amazing novel study or text selection choice. One year and a couple of years later, we might discover that unit no longer is engaging or fits the needs of our student population. So it’s really important as much as we love our tech selections and are proud of them and put work and effort into making them the best choices for our students.

[00:02:30] We have to be ready at any time to be able to switch things up. So an openness to feedback around text selection is a really great strategy for making sure that your current choices are relevant for your students, and making sure that they make sense over a longer period of time.

[00:02:51] The next tip for engaging novel studies is to really consider incorporating choice and voice. And here’s what I mean about those two things. So choice It’s fun because it means that you have, a variety of text options with a variety of different topics. Maybe you’re thinking about doing a novel study lit circles idea.

[00:03:13] And so you have groups of five or six and each of them gets to pick an interesting novel that they’re most excited about. Or maybe there’s a variety of different novels to choose from and each one helps support a different reading level. Or a specific set of student interests, or is really responsive to a specific student population in your class.

[00:03:35] While in a perfect world, we would have choice. And if you do have the opportunity to have choice with your text selections for your novel studies, I say run with it and pick as many different excellent choices. There are so many out there for your students. However, that’s not always the case. I remember as a new teacher being so jazzed about getting to develop my own novel studies, only to find out that the same novels had been used at my school sites for, 15 years.

[00:04:05] Plus years, so there wasn’t a lot of opportunity or funds to really be able to break the mold and mix things up with text selection. So choice while it can refer to the actual text, we get to choose a lot of times as teachers. We don’t necessarily get that choice. So in that case, choice can take on a different a different meaning, and that’s making the choices necessary to incorporate many different voices and perspectives into our novel study.

[00:04:34] Making sure there are opportunities for supplementary texts. to be involved in the conversation, or a pop culture connection, or if it’s a historical fiction piece introducing other texts written by other authors about that specific, historical moment in time. So really this combination of choice and voice is so important for engaging novel studies and not only just the text that we choose, but the choices we have for how we want to incorporate diverse perspectives and points of view and additional voices in our novel studies.

[00:05:16] So the third tip for engaging novel studies is around embracing routines. Routines are sometimes I think they’re mistakenly mixed together with the idea of the exact same thing every day. And routines do not have to be monotonous. A routine during a novel study does not mean that every day students come into your classroom, they open up their packet, they read one chapter, and they write a one paragraph reflection.

[00:05:45] And then they come back the next day and they do that again. That could be a routine. I don’t know if I would recommend that in terms of student engagement. But Routine that I’m meaning in this context is all about dynamic routines that have a structure, but so much room for student engagement and student interest and so much room for interesting dynamics as well.

[00:06:10] So up on the screen, I have a few different ideas of some engaging routines. You might consider incorporating literature circles or a stations rotation. You might consider reflection writing or maybe a daily bell ringer or exit ticket to frame out the activities you’re doing with your novel studies.

[00:06:29] Again, if you do the same bell ringer every single day, that might not be engaging for your students. But if one day your bell ringer is to, spend five minutes writing from the perspective of one of the main characters in your novel study, and the next day your bell ringer is to locate three vocabulary words in the chapter that they read that they don’t know yet and writing them down.

[00:06:53] Now the bell ringer is the frame, so it’s the routine. Every day I come to class and I see the bell ringer on the board. Or I look in Google Classroom and I check today’s bell ringer in the daily announcements, but the bell ringer, the content itself, there’s so much room to play with. So routines are engaging and can be engaging.

[00:07:16] when we use them as a frame and then all of the dynamics, all of the exciting or changeable activities come around those frames. But really the routine is the home base of our lesson. Structure for a novel study is really good to help students break down what can be a very long unit into smaller, more manageable chunks.

[00:07:42] But it’s important that we don’t just recycle the daily content and that we continue to find opportunities to evolve our practice and incorporate new ideas.

[00:07:56] The next tip for engaging novel studies is to make them interdisciplinary. Any opportunities you have to connect your novel study to other units that you’ve done in your class or maybe even to another content area is another opportunity for your students to think about the novel study beyond your own classroom.

[00:08:18] There are many ways of doing this. Perhaps there’s a really cool music or art connection, or the text that you are doing a novel study about is about a specific time period, and you want to study, musicians from that time period, or art, or maybe it takes place in a different country or another place, and you want students to be able to Sample some of the cooking or the food or see some images or pictures of that location.

[00:08:50] Anytime we can incorporate other multimedia or other content areas, we help reinforce the learning from the novel study and we really make it come to life. Here I have just an image. This is from a course that we’ve created at Teaching Channel about creating a novel study unit for the text Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer.

[00:09:14] And this is just a list of some fantastic learning activities. That you could use to engage students during a novel study about that text. And what you’ll see is that there are a variety of categories. It’s a text that you might read in, a literature course. But there’s an entire section about learning activities that you could connect to science or to a multimedia or a media literacy course or to a communications and a speaking and listening course.

[00:09:43] So there are many ways to blend and crossover when you’re developing a novel study to really engage your students from a variety of modalities.

[00:09:57] The next tip for an engaging novel study is carving out time to talk. And this really is one of the best parts about a novel study in a classroom full of students is that you get to share all of the learning and the discussion and excitement together. I think back to the times that I was a language arts teacher and some of my favorite days were Socratic seminars or philosophical chairs discussions with my students about the text.

[00:10:26] They had exciting things to say, we’d always pick the times to discuss right after a cliffhanger or a really exciting plot twist in the novels, and this got students so excited to be able to talk about what they were reading and to hear each other’s perspectives. One thing to think about when thinking about time to talk in class is not just to open up the forum, sit back and expect students are going to talk for your 45 minute class period, but really thinking strategically about the different ways that you can facilitate discussion.

[00:10:59] So you might one day decide to have partner discussions. The next day, a full group discussion. The next day, a literature circle or a small group. You might also consider the different ways that students can talk that extend beyond verbal. I know in these situations, we can sometimes privilege verbal communication and verbal discussion as our main form of classroom capital.

[00:11:24] However, there are many other ways that students can participate in class discussions that go beyond raising their hand and saying something out loud. Whether you’re using a Google Doc and students are typing notes back and forth to have a synchronous but written discussion, or students are jotting discussions together.

[00:11:42] Discussed notes in a notebook or on a piece of paper during discussion to show their engagement even when they might not want to share their ideas out loud. There are lots of opportunities for students to share and talk about a text to get them excited and engaged with the learning.

[00:12:04] Our next tip for engaging novel studies is to use and incorporate backward design or forward thinking around your unit before starting your novel study. You can’t do it all in a novel study, and this is something I struggled with for a long time, because novel studies do take up a large amount of unit plan space.

[00:12:25] So I think about, some quarters in my class where a novel study might take up almost an entire quarter. And that’s a lot of time. That’s, two plus months of instruction and activities. And so we might say to ourselves, Oh, I want to do, I really want to focus on vocab, but I also want to focus on theme.

[00:12:43] And wait, what about character development and symbolism? There’s so many great things I want to do, but when we take on too many things for a novel study, it can feel overwhelming for students and difficult to have the depth required to really drive home a power standard or a skill that we want students to acquire.

[00:13:03] Backward design is one of many excellent approaches when thinking about unit design to create intentional takeaways and understandings that you want your students to focus on during a novel study. So really taking the time to establish what the essential questions are and letting that be a maximum of two questions.

[00:13:26] And really focusing on a specific skill. So if you want the focus to really be around character development for a specific novel, letting character development be a frame for the entire unit, starting from page one, where students are filling in a character development analysis. Sheet as they’re reading the book and they’re coming back to the same character the entire unit That’s just one example of a great way of having a home base Not only will it make your instruction clearer and more focused But it will also help your students not get lost in a sea of activities During a longer unit like a novel study And finally, our last tip for engaging novel studies is to think about comprehension, to say yes to comprehension, and to then extend beyond that.

[00:14:23] I remember as a teacher, every time I would have a novel study, my learning target would often end up being something along the lines of, I can read and understand a complex text. And while that was true, while every day my students were reading and comprehending a complex text, there was so much more meat in my novel study unit that standard really wasn’t doing all of the other work justice.

[00:14:52] So of course we want students to be able to comprehend the text. We want them to be able to recall the events that happened in Chapter 3, or to be able to summarize what happened at the end of Part 1. But we also want them to do something more than that, too. And so I think Bloom’s Taxonomy is a really great way of thinking about The various ways that we can extend our novel study learning beyond the comprehension.

[00:15:20] If you look at that you can see that remember, so recall of facts, is really at the bottom of that pyramid, is really at the bottom of the pyramid. It’s our foundation. But beyond that, we want students to be able to extend to do many other important analytical skills around comprehension and analysis.

[00:15:44] We want them to be able to apply information from the novel study and compare it to their own lives. We want them to be able to critique something and evaluate. We want students to be able to create new concepts and new writing and new thinking based on their learning from a novel study. So yes, we do want them to understand and read a complex text, but we want to shift from recall only in a novel study to really consider the analysis that they can do beyond it.

[00:16:16] So that’s our last and really important point that we want to drive home when thinking about engaging novel studies is if students are just asked a multiple choice question about facts from a novel study, They’ll do the reading, they’ll probably do well on those multiple choice texts, but how can we move the learning beyond simple recall to make the learning truly come alive for them?

[00:16:41] That’s the extension, that’s the engagement, and that’s the part that can be really dynamic, exciting, and engaging for your students.

[00:16:52] We hope that some of these tips and tricks and tools for engaging novel studies help you as you consider and think about the next novel study that you’re creating for your classroom. Are you ready to craft an engaging novel study unit for your students and you want a little support along the way?

[00:17:09] Take one of our fabulous Awesome, brand new, beyond the book courses as part of our Teaching Channel course library. These courses focus specifically on a young adult text that’s meant to be engaging, dynamic, and exciting for your students. And then the entire course asks you to interact with that young adult text and to develop a unit of study backed by backward design frameworks.

[00:17:39] And then with the support, 30 plus learning activities for your students to engage in as you teach your novel study. Currently, we have three courses. We have one about stamped racism, anti racism, and you by Abram X. Kendi and Jason Reynolds. We have 5332, which is Braiding Sweetgrass for Young Adults by Robin Wall Kimmerer.

[00:18:02] And then we have 5332, it’s Trevor Noah, Born a Crime the young adult version of Trevor Noah’s autobiography. We’re hoping there’s something for everyone and we’re hoping to continue to expand our Beyond the Book course series. But all of the engaging strategies that we talked about in today’s mini webinar show up in the pedagogical foundations of our Beyond the Book courses as well.

[00:18:29] Thank you so much for taking the time today and learning with us, discussing with us, and considering the ways that we can make novel studies engaging for our students.