Adapted from an article by Debbie Abilock, published in School Libraries in Canada. Spring 1995: 10-14.

Opening snapshot  Thursday morning. Classes have begun. In the Library some 25 parents are locked in animated discussions, some near the coffee, others near the fiction shelves.

"Has anyone ever used To Kill a Mockingbird with fifth and sixth graders?" Vaughn asks. "I love the book and would like to use it, because it meshes so nicely with their 'Civil War to Civil Rights' curriculum."

"We saw the movie after reading the book---the contrast provoked an animated discussion!" responds Leslie.

"Actually," I add, "we've had mixed success in the past. Two years ago another group of kids just couldn't seem to empathize with Scout or understand the racial dilemma. You might wait until the curriculum has moved into more recent African-American history before beginning this book."

Nine o'clock. Literary Club is beginning. Pairs of parents and teachers join groups of children in the Library, the Science and Music rooms. Finding enough space for 135 children is a challenge---for the last eight years we've used the Director's office and an Administrative conference room, as well as various classrooms.

Literary Club context  "School is about practicing to wrap one's mind around real and complex ideas, those of fundamental consequence for oneself and for the culture." Theodore Sizer describes Literary Club well. Each week children meet with trained parents and teachers in small groups to tussle with a piece of literature. They learn to think about an author's purpose, to develop questions which can be approached from multiple perspectives, and to value the richness of the group's thinking.

The idea evolved when the teacher of a class of combined third- and fourth-graders shared with me her frustration about challenging a small group of highly-gifted readers within her classroom. Remembering how much I enjoyed my English seminars in graduate school, I offered to take the group.

Large differences in reading abilities are common in a school for gifted students; musical aptitude or mathematical prowess does not necessarily correlate with linguistic skill. In this particular class, for example, there were non- readers alongside students with a remarkable ability to read sophisticated material with ease and sensitivity.  The need to meet a range of abilities was the initial seed for this program, which combines elements of a Socratic seminar and literature circles with a structure that flexibly groups students by ability and interests, involves parents and the community, fosters engagement and develops student-ownership of the process and a school-wide community of readers.

From its beginnings in that one classroom (1978) Literary Club grew to almost 200 students in grades 2-8 working with all content-area teachers and trained volunteers every year. Each week pairs of adults met with mixed-age groups of 6-10 students for an hour. Research strongly suggests that small groups can have a significant impact on quality of student thinking and achievement.

Program design groupings  Since cooperative student groups are critical to the success of Literary Club, the school librarian must work closely with classroom teachers and tutors to sort students at the beginning of the school year. First we identify readers capable of decoding and comprehending at about the same level.  Behavior, personality attributes and friendships are all weighed. How many males and females? How many children from each grade and each classroom? What is the ratio of adult- vs. peer-focused children? Students are asked about interests, genres they like, how much they currently read and whether they like to talk about what they're reading.  Taken together, it would be misleading to conclude that reading groups are formed strictly by "ability." More accurately, we are grouping students according to our sense of their ability to profit from an instructional group.

Program support school librarian Pairs of leaders work with the same group of children from October through May, with administrative support and extensive inservice from the school librarian. In a program this size, the administrative demands of the program make it impossible for the school librarian to be a full-time leader in one group.  Ordering paperbacks, observing groups, watching videotapes of sessions, preparing handouts, arranging inservice, reading current research on reading and integrated curriculum as well as children's literature, and locating substitutes (or even subbing on the fly) are the responsibility of the librarian.

Leader training school librarian  Literary Club training enables the adults to facilitate the discussion of a story or book.  Their goal is to provide a setting in which students can engage with a text in a community of readers who value complex, rich thinking.  Homework assignments are short, requiring about an hour to complete. A reading assignment of a short story, poem, essay or several chapters from a novel is coupled with directions to develop interesting questions for the group to discuss or a "wondering" you have. These student-generated questions act as "windows" to the child's thinking, perspectives, and feelings. Unlike the artificiality of Daniels' roles, students are positioned to ask authentic questions.  In contrast to the Great Books approach, which places special importance on "interpretive" questions, we believe that meaningful questions are often initially grounded in the individual's life experiences, what is called "text-to-self" connections.  Why Shabanu cannot disobey her father or why Ender's brother and sister treat him differently are approached through the lenses of the student's own family dynamics and cultural heritage, in addition to the author's assumptions within the book. Marilyn Kimura, one of the librarians, describes the search for personal relevance in this way:

"Why do we care about literature? Good literature shows patterns against which we can measure ourselves, gaining self-knowledge. It can reveal our individual differences as people while pointing up our common bonds."

Research framework envisionment  Leaders guide their community of readers through processes (Langer, 1994) which effective readers experience when they interact with a literary text.  Langer's envisionment describes readers in a process of coming to understand through wonderings, hunches, suppositions and predictions.  Students enjoy the complexity of language, express curiosity about characters and perspectives because these contribute to authentic meaning-making, rather than provide answers for a worksheets. "There is always a question, but not always an answer," a boy philosophizes. As trust builds and risk-taking increases, students are fascinated with evolving speculations, exhilarated by the pursuit of elusive meanings and comfortable with the disequilibrium of shifting stances. 

Vantage point stepping in  Each session with leaders asking questions to evoke initial impressions: "Anything you noticed that you want to talk about?" "What impressions do you have...?"  As students step into the text,  they notice and gather information, make connections to what they already know and predictions about what might happen: "I wonder...?"  "Do you think...?" 

Vantage point moving through  Student-generated homework questions ("Why do you think he...?" "What will she do...?") emerge as the community of readers moves through the text, responding to the relationships and motivations of characters, making text-to-text connections.  During a discussion on A Bone From A Dry Sea, a book which draws parallels between two different societies by juxtaposing prehistoric and present-day events at the same geographical location, leaders' questions clarify ("Where do you see the males struggling for power?"), request that a student make his reasoning process visible ("Why does a child command respect---might you think out loud for us?"), and help one speaker relate to another ("How are you connecting Vinny's intuitive knowledge with what Diana read about Li repairing the injured leg? ").  Adults practice these mediated questions and the use of body language during leader training sessions.  The ultimate goal of facilitation is to best reflect each student's growing understanding to the group and to the questioning student.  "When we discussed my question, I realize that I hadn't thought before about..." reflects one student. Participants learn to remain open to consider alternatives:  "Discussions are so intense and powerful...when you think you have it all planned out...such a powerful phrase changes you," remarks a student.

Of utmost importance is the student's ownership for raising what Grant Wiggins calls the "essential questions," ones which have no one, obvious "right" answer, which require higher-order thinking skills, and go to the heart of the selection. Research studies have shown that student questions generate deeper processing of the material among their peers than teacher-prepared questions. Because more homework questions are developed than can be answered during an hour's discussion, the leaders' task is to help students cluster similar questions, so that all work is validated. When leaders write student questions on the board they can be grouped, analyzed and prioritized. After one group realizes that all their questions about The Witches' Broom either focus on the neighbors' responses to the broom or the true identity of the broom in the closet, they they agree to consider them together.

Vantage point rethinking  Prompted by questions or drawing, rethinking turns students back again toward their own lives to connect their literary experience to a remembered feeling or prior event.  

Vantage point reader as critic  Finally, facilitators suggest ways to step beyond the text to raise questions about symbols, the author's voice and word choice, and to other authors and texts they've shared.  Discussions of literary style are a natural outgrowth of the workshop approach to writing. One group begins to ask "Shark Reader" questions. A "Shark Reader" notices that slippery, incisive detail or that word or adjective which shows one's awareness of the author's choice of vocabulary. It is a playful way of acknowledging that close reading is a natural corollary of "Sharp Writers."  

In a discussion of literary symbols in a discussion of Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, a group is fascinated with the bus filled with white children that deliberately drives threateningly close to the African-American students, covering them with mud. "I was wondering about the bus...the splashing was like this symbol of everlasting terror," muses one girl. "When the bus breaks down, the black and white children are both dirty now, both the same color for the first time," responds a boy. "In a way," replies the girl, "it symbolizes their 'unfreedom'---mud is something you don't like." As they reason aloud for each other, students discover their own thoughts and feelings.  Lucy Caulkins, a leading educator in the workshop approach to teaching writing, tells us that the books she remembers are those she has talked about.

Facilitation authentic conversation  The purpose is to evoke child-to-child conversations with the leader focusing student responses by asking for clarification and elaboration or guiding the process.  Facilitation is a difficult role because students may feel deference toward adults as older and wiser readers or believe that adults are looking for "right" answers.  Subtle messages in schools can condition students to accept disenfranchisement in a classroom, as Betsy Byars recreates so well in this selection from The TV Kid:

"Do you think he was just talking about one year passing?" the teacher went on. "Or do you think, Lennie, that the poet was seeing his whole life as a year, that he was seeing his whole life slipping past?"

"I'm not sure." Lennie's hand was still on his chin as if ready to stroke a long gray beard.

"Class?"

"His whole life slipping past," the class chorused together. They had this teacher so long that they could tell, just from the way she asked a question, what they were supposed to answer

Since the students' questions and responses shape the discussion, while adults are trained to facilitate a process, there is less opportunity for loaded questions that guide a group to an adult's interpretation.  Content-area teachers and parents understand that they are not "teaching" the meaning of a literary work.  In the absence of adult opinions and judgments, the locus of control resides within the students and the group retains responsibility for meaning-making.

Parent leaders are also encouraged to ask students questions based on a genuine need to understand students and assist them in presenting their own ideas intelligibly.  They are not "testing" whether the student has read the material or can recall details from the text.  For example, in The Prince of the Pond, a prince who has been turned by a wicked hag into a frog builds a caring relationship with Jade, a female frog. He loves her, yet he grieves for his past life. Sensing when a child has spoken a kind of "verbal shorthand" about the prince's ambivalent attitude, a leader asks "Are you trying to figure out how the De Fawg Prwn can almost lie to Jade and still love her?"  Authentic questions and genuine responses model conversations that can be replicated among students as the year progresses.

Leaders skillfully facilitate sometimes heated debates helping students value the critical stances of others: "You can argue with people about something and still be their friend," a sixth grader advises a new student.  Paradoxically it is also the leader's job to carve out silence in a discussion. "Don't step on my sentence," a child firmly requests. Research documents that the time between asking a question and responding, as well as the time between one response and another, improves the quality and raises the cognitive level of the responses. "Take a minute to jot down your ideas about this question before we begin," suggests a leader, using a technique that invites longer responses and the search for more evidence. "Let conversations take their course...even if it means several minutes of silent thinking time," suggests one boy to his leaders on a midyear evaluation. Over time, these silences nurture deeper student-to-student interactions.

Once proposed, an idea becomes the communal property of the group and students learn to applaud the synergy that emerges.  "It's a lot easier to understand the story when discussing it together...I usually go out for recess understanding what I didn't used to understand," remarks a satisfied third-grade boy. Since closure rarely reflects the consensus of a single "correct" interpretation, the leaders are trained to acknowledge teamwork. "Why do you think we had so many ideas?" asks a leader at the end of class.

Leader training ongoing  Teaching adults to orchestrate these "literary chamber groups" begins with an all-day workshop called Grand Conversations every fall. Alongside parents volunteering for the school's program, parents and teachers from other local schools learn the philosophical underpinnings of the program together.  There is practical advice on organizing Clubs in other settings and suggestions of children's books well-suited for discussion. We practice a literary discussion, rehearse facilitation skills and discuss videotapes of Literary Club sessions.  Continuing practice and reflection are essential elements of ongoing weekly facilitator meetings.  Book selection, behavioral norms, facilitation and questioning are often discussed. Since a significant number of volunteers return to the program each year, for as long as eight years, leader-to-leader advice proves particularly valuable. Leaders, like the students, are empowered by their growing expertise:

"I like discovering the potential of each child and participating in bringing it out through the discussion and appreciation of literature. I learned as much as they did about strong individuality and growth through respect of others' opinions."

Each week Literary Clubs are videotaped by the school librarians.  They also schedule themselves to replace facilitators, so that leaders can observe each others' groups. Periodically, using videotapes of their own Clubs or notes from observations by one librarian, each adult team meets with the librarians to discuss their group. Ongoing feedback and reflective assessment are as vital for volunteers as for all learners.

Over the years, a variety of staff members and community members have volunteered for Literary Club: Middle School science and computer teachers, Elementary classroom teachers, the systems administrator, the Head, a secretary, teaching assistants, tutors, alumni parents and babysitters.  New volunteers are recruited by word of mouth and through back-to-school night presentations. Facilitators expect to commit about an hour or two at home each week to read the selection and prepare for the discussion with their co-leader.  Additional homework is added when leaders are surveying possible book choices to present to the students.

Parent involvement benefits  Research shows that involving parents in students' education leads to impressive gains in achievement and helps foster positive attitudes toward learning among students. When parents see themselves as partners in carrying out the goals of the program, they can articulate these goals to their own children and to other parents. Occasionally it is necessary to give leaders personal information about a student. For example, when leaders are concerned about a child who is not thriving, it is essential to provide enough information, without violating family confidentiality, to help them treat a child's underachievement in a proactive way. We explicitly explain to Literary Club volunteers that they are considered teachers and we will expect them to treat this information professionally.  In one dramatic example, a leader's observations led to identification and remediation for a child with an elusive learning disability. 

It is also natural for both new and experienced leaders to experience frustrations. Any good volunteer program must be prepared to raise questions and concerns openly. In the long run, through sometimes intense conversations, the program gains strength and children benefit. The librarians comb the end-of-year evaluations by parents and students for suggestions on changes in structures or practices, ideas for book selections and future inservice. 

Benefits to the school-at-large are considerable. During the over 20 years that Literary Club has been in operation, the school has seen parents' understanding and involvement broaden to include support for the school's other goals, programs and staff.

Literature choice Naturally, the selection of literature is central to the success of Literary Clubs. One leader reports:

"What I find personally satisfying is discovering fabulous kids' literature I didn't know existed, the excitement and lust for literature our kids brought to the group, getting to know my co-leader, and working together to try to meet the kids' needs."

Both the way in which literature is chosen, and the qualities that such literature should have, are important. Leaders are advised to begin with a short stories as they learn about the children in their group.  As the group progresses, the choice of literature is negotiated among the students from groups of books suggested by the leaders, other faculty and the librarians.  Some selections may eliminated because they are not currently in paperback, others because too many members of the group have read them, or even because the leaders themselves do not like them. Books with ambiguity and ethical dilemmas, like Lois Lowry's The Giver or Avi's Nothing But the Truth, and those with strongly realized characters and compelling plot like Charlotte's Web and So Far From the Bamboo Grove, are regular candidates. Over the course of the school year, most groups discuss between four and eight books. In an end of the year evaluation, a leader writes:

"...when it was right, and most of the time it was...when as leaders we established order, ideas were exchanged and shared and debated, and the kids listened and built on these ideas, it was a most wonderful, fulfilling educational experience for them and me...I've watched as students debated whether it was better to have answered 'No, No!' as a Japanese American internee in Farewell to Manzanar, or discussed if John Proctor should have 'confessed' his crime of talking with witches to save his life in The Crucible, or wondered why suicide had become a prevalent option in Fahrenheit 451."

Program assessment context Any evaluation of a program like Literary Club must build upon the school's larger literacy goals. This program is only partially successful if it produces children who enjoy literary discussion. Equally important is the development of lifelong readers who love reading. Such readers emerge from repeated, entranced interactions with literature in a relaxed and pleasurable way. To encourage this, a ground rule in Literary Club homework is that students always read an assignment first for "fun." This reinforces reading immersion, the hypnotic enchantment that Victor Nell calls "ludic" reading. As one girl exalts, "I like to read the book slowly and get the peaches and cream out of it."

A program of this caliber can only exist within a larger literacy context. Self-selected silent reading, a "Bookshare" program, " Book Buddies" pairing of older and younger students, a "Book Fair," book swaps, a workshop approach to writing, and a monthly Adult Literary Club generate a continual buzz about reading. In truth, no single program can create successful readers. The final, integrated "performance" of a community of readers involves students, parents, librarians and teachers continually engaged in literacy experiences.

Works Cited