Communication skills for teaching book clubs should be a vital part of our planning process. If students aren’t engaging in meaningful talk during book clubs, are they worth anything? Unfortunately, we can’t just expect kids to sit around and effortlessly chat about what they’ve read for an hour like the women do in my neighborhood. Truth is, they need to be taught how to handle themselves in these situations, and these communication skills for teaching better book clubs are just as important as comprehension skills.
Ultimately, what I care about most in teaching—what gets me excited to write these blogs every week and design out courses to help other teachers get better at their jobs—is helping students to love reading. And when they are in the right setting with the right prompts, book clubs are one of the most meaningful, lasting ways to create life long readers.
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Why teach communication skills?
Communicating about books isn’t going to be second nature for most of your kids. That’s where you, as the teacher, need to know the right communication skills for teaching book clubs to impart to students so they deepen their own comprehension of content. Take good notes on students’ communication skills so you can continue to move them forward throughout your book clubs.
These are a progression from K through 5th grade, and students will be at different spots in this process, depending on their communication skills. Start with skill 1 first to deliberately take steps in improving these skills in your classroom.
Skill 1: Elaborating & Clarifying
The skill of elaborating and clarifying ensures students can provide more—and better—information during their book club conversations.
Skill 2: Supporting Ideas
Supporting ideas forced students to use examples and text evidence from the book, strengthening their ideas and understanding as they make connections between the text and their life experiences.
Skill 3: Building on/Challenging an Idea
This skill is especially helpful when trying to discover more difficult concepts like character motivation or theme. Prompts can be used to get these discussions going, but there is a lot of potential here for deep conversation.
Skill 4: Paraphrasing
I like to think of paraphrasing as a way to keep track of our thoughts, and that’s exactly what it does for students in their context. By listening to others and provide a synopsis of what’s taking place in their discussion, students learn to become better genuine real listeners and better empathize and connect with other perspectives and ideas
Skill 5: Synthesizing
The most complex and challenging skill to master, synthesizing effectively helps students to recall a conversation and identify key the ideas and themes that emerged through. Students need to be able to reflect on all of their previous conversational skills and then bundle their thoughts to provide a conclusion to the conversation.
Communication skills teaching resources
Here are a few of my favorite resources to use when teaching communication skills to students for book clubs.
- Create your own teaching scenarios or grab these already made Teaching Scenarios to practice talking without the additional challenge of content.
- Write communication prompts on the board or grab these Cue cards so that students can see them as they are in discussion- giving them time to pause and frame their language so they can say what they really want to say
- Teaching for comprehension – this amazing book dedicates an entire section on book clubs and the process of getting students talking about reading. It really helped me understanding how communication skills build on one another, and it will explain way better than I can what we’re covering over the next five weeks.
- Reading Strategies – Another section in this book includes sample reading conversation lessons with anchor charts and lesson language ready to use.
- Read more here about formative assessment in book clubs if you are looking for ways to assess communication and comprehension.
The time when you’re teaching your students how to be the best possible participants in their book clubs is the perfect time to emphasize, reteach, and help your students master conversational skills and help them to deepen their reading comprehension. This is a real, genuine life skill, and it could be one of the more important lessons you teach your students this year.
P.S. – Don’t forget to download this free guide to help you organize the resources and tools that will help you capitalize on data and formative assessment in your classroom.
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