Thursday, July 2, 2009

Online book study?

I've had a "d'oh" moment...

Let me preface this post with a bit of background...

I am an avid reader of fiction and comprehend fiction quite well, but struggle a lot with comprehension of difficult texts. I've known this for quite a while... in high school, I was in the single digit page numbers of Beowulf until the day we tested on it.. and in college, I was *so* eternally grateful for Monarch notes because they paraphrased the text into contempory language.

Last week, at our AVID summer institute, one of our assignments was to read an article about college readiness vs college preparedness. After struggling quite a while to read the edu-speak, the article became crystal clear during our group discussion of the material. This cycle repeated itself later on in the week when I had to read an editoral about 9/11 and we discussed it in a Socratic Seminar. These two examples really illustrated the power of discussion for deeper understanding.

Fast forward to this week... I was reading on AtoZTeacherForums and read a great post on "must-reads" for teachers. I started looking at my own professional library, and realized that I have many of the must-haves, but I haven't read them all and the few I have read were a while back. Coupled with my "a-ha" moment of last week, I decided to search out an online book study group, only to find that they really don't exist :(

So... the question at hand is...
1) Do you know of somewhere I should look? OR
2) Would any of you be interested in doing a book study?

Have a happy 4th!

1 comment:

Shireen Dadmehr said...

Well, that sounds intriguing ... I guess, depending on the topic of the book, I'd be interested. I have a stack of teaching books I've read snippets of, but then I get busy and never get back to them. My current one like that is, "Getting to Got It!" (http://shop.ascd.org/ProductDisplay.cfm?ProductID=107024)

Send me e-mail if you get a group going (math_mambo@yahoo.com).

Ms. Cookie