The Power of Social Reading

Are your students reading? Not turning pages and vaguely processing some text, but rather really truly engaged in devouring stories? This is the story of how one small, rural school in Western NY re-discovered reading…and how you can implement the same successful program in your library.

Alexander Central Schools is a district like many in this rural area of Western NY, the three schools are grouped together in two buildings on a small campus in the center of a smaller town. K-12, the school population hovers around 1,000. Like many other districts around the country, their middle school suffers from lower achievement when compared to elementary and high school scores; a large part of the problem are poor scores in ELA and reading. After being targeted as a district to receive extra support, the local Special Education Training and Resource Center (SERTC) coordinator and I began working on a plan.

The idea was simple, re-introduce reading to students as a social activity by providing them an online space where they could review books and share their thoughts with teachers and peers. To accomplish this, we built a book review site using the powerful open source content management system, Drupal. There was already a book review module available, and with a bit of tweaking we had something that would work. The focus would be on student summaries and reviews, with additional opportunities to tag and rate the books using a five-star system. The results were simply astounding.

Over the course of this pilot year, the roughly 60 students in the Alexander 6th grade (the single pilot grade) submitted almost 600 book reviews! While some teachers adopted the book review site and used it for a class assignment as a way to track reading (there is a 25 book a year requirement in NY state), most of the reviews came from students who just loved the new system. We actually ran into some backup issues because the site was unable to lock the database for copying at 1:00am as there were students writing book reviews at that time.

So, what made this project successful? One of the biggest factors for success is the excellent librarian at Alexander (K-12), Kristie Miller. In addition to the book review site, Kristie Miller developed a reward and recognition system that highlighted successful readers and reviewers. Based on reading habits, students would be welcomed to participate in a bi-weekly button ceremony. Like reality TV shows, who know that tapping into the primal power of ceremonies evokes an instinctual reaction in our sub-conscious brains, the libraries button ceremonies turned small, homemade buttons with yellow and green geometric shapes into the most desirable object in the school. One of the biggest attractions was that in this combined building with Middle and High Schools, only the 6th graders could earn this buttons. Even seniors were quite jealous, and ended up having to barter with 6th graders as the only way to get a button. Talk about placing value on reading!

So in the end there are a couple of ideas to take away from this:
1) Building a social network in the library re-introduces reading as a collaborative, communal activity. Any number of software packages can be used to provide this social space, from blogs (a local installation of wordpress or edublogs.org maybe?) to podcasts (even just files stored locally and displayed on a local html index page), or even a wiki (wikispaces, pbwiki, Zoho Notebook). The key is to build a space that uses moderated trust to give students a voice. For more on the technologies, check out Meredith Farkas’ newly released Social Software in Libraries.
2) Ceremony – not just rewards and recognition, but a primal ceremony – can enhance the social “benefits” of this type of program. Maybe it is because this ceremony brings the intangible of virtual submissions to a social network into the physical world, or maybe it is just because we are wired to respect pomp and circumstance…either way, it worked!
3) Get everyone involved. Seth Godin had a great post the other day about the different times when we need to convince one, a few, most, or all. Social book reviews can certainly start with one, but work best when you can reach most of the students in a population. In this case, the system provided the tools, support, and some new graphic novels and hi-low books to get the pilot started. All we had to do was empower the one librarian who could spread the word. She spread the word to a few teachers, who then had the added bonus ability of requiring use of the book review system by all students. In the end, most students used the system. The new version of the book review module is fully integrated into our next generation library portal at http://fish4info.org which means that any authenticated user viewing a book in the system will see available reviews with tags and ratings as well as be invited to read and/or write his/her own review. In this way, the work of even a few can benefit (and encourage adoption by) the all.

This was a great project. Many thanks go to Kristie Miller, the most excellent librarian from Alexander Central Schools, as well as the students, teachers and administration from the district who made this possible. As with so many other Web 2.0 items, this was a tool with no value without user contributions. Thank you also to the local SETRC office and coordinator Jacqueline Czamanske for being a partner in this pilot.

We are hoping to write a more in depth article that addresses the educational gains made by the students at some point in the future as well, so hopefully more information can follow to encourage replication of this very successful pilot.

Posted in SL2.0, infomancy, reading | 3 Comments »