The Bearcat Bookclub: Reinventing the Book Report with Schoology
“You read a lot, don’t you?” Mrs. Grego, my junior English teacher, said as she handed back graded essay with a red “A” printed largely on top. She’d woken me from a semi-napping state, so I mumbled, “I guess so. Why?” “Good readers are good writers, and you have a beautiful, natural prose.”
Honestly, I didn’t know what the heck she meant at the time, but that one little comment changed the course of my destiny. I had a learning disability in math, so naturally, I was in all regular classes. I’d spent my first two high school years being unchallenged by a teacher who probably managed to not get fired because she was the wife of the superintendent. Unlike some of my other rowdy classmates, I read. I read everything my teachers gave me and much more at home. We were too financially strapped for cable or Nintendo, so when I complained to my…show more content… Gallagher’s book, I decided to bring the book report back. I knew that in order to gain student interest, I was going to have to reinvent the book report in a way that they had never seen before.
I thought briefly back to a lesson that Kelly Gallagher explained in, Write Like This. In it, he makes the excellent point that every student knows about Amazon stars or Rotten Tomatoes. Why not use this as an opportunity to reinvent the boring old book report and get students back into books and off of their phones? Students also need a real audience in order to take their writing seriously, and it must be done electronically in a method most like social media in order for them to pay it any attention.
I pondered how could I make this work with my favorite form of communication and collaboration. In response, I’ve created what I call, The Bearcat Bookclub using Schoology groups and Media
