I have run a perfect Book Club in my Human Ecology course for 2 years. Unlike a traditional journal club, students read different things and are responsible for teaching these things to a small group of peers. In this “how to” post, you may feel uncomfortable at the amount of time dedicated to this style of learning – which explicitly decentralizes the teacher as expert and places that responsibility with students. As the instructor, your job throughout this activity will be to float between conversations and keep track of time. It requires very little pre-class prep on your part (bonus!). I’ll start at the end with an anonymous student reflection:
“Made learning fun, interesting and engaging while not putting pressure on explicitly getting high marks. I think I learned more in this course then any other I’ve taken. I cannot stress enough how amazing this class was. I came to campus for this class, it was fantastic.”
OK, let’s go:
Step 1: Choose a book. Because my course is for non-biology students, I have chosen books that are written by scientists but for a general audience. Two years ago, the theme for the course was “COVID, a 5 year memoir” and we read A Primate’s Memoir, by Robert Sapolsky. This year the theme was “Sex and Gender” and we read Evolution’s Rainbow, by Joan Roughgarden. Controversial books are OK – the point is to pick something engaging that aligns with your course material. I spend a decent amount of time introducing both the book and the author. Unlike multiple authored papers in journals, both of these books are written by single authors without standard academic references. As budding academics, I expect students to be skeptical of source information. Who are these people? Why would I believe what Joan Roughgarden has to say about sex and gender? Although a biologist, Sapolsky is the first to admit his shortcomings as a neurobiologist living amongst and documenting baboon ecology. Why should we believe him? Creating context for both the book and the author are important for setting the stage. Following this, I introduce a set of ongoing questions/prompts that students reflect on during their reading. (I have students upload reflections to Canvas just as an archive to help with course projects. This is not essential.)
Sample questions:
- 1) Be prepared to explain the broad theme of your chapter in 2-3 minutes. What were the main points? What was most interesting to you? What was the big takeaway?
- 2) Select one specific example to share with your team that illustrates the theme(s) of the chapter. This should take 1-2 minutes
- 3) Be ready to lead an informal discussion in your team about how the information in points 1 and 2 inform, support, or disrupt our North American (or other) cultural understanding of sex and gender in humans. (about 5 minutes)
Step 2: Fixed groups. Students assemble into small groups of 3-4 that will work as teams throughout the term. In these fixed groups, each student is responsible for reading a different thing each week. For example, in preparation for the first Book Club, I will write the titles and lengths* of Ch. 1-4 on the board. Students in each fixed group will divide these up so that each student is reading something unique to that group.
* I find writing page numbers for each chapter helpful. Chapters vary wildly in length – especially for Joan Roughgarden’s book. Students appreciate being able to choose a shorter chapter on their busier weeks.
Step 3: Expert groups. (This activity will run like a Jig-Saw from here). When students come to class for Book Club day, they assemble into expert groups first. These are all the students in the class that read the same chapter. For example, I typically have 6 groups of 4 students, so that means 6 people read Ch. 1. (These 6 are the “Chapter 1 experts” and hold their own meeting at the start of class in a corner of the room.) I originally thought this would be a 15 minute activity, but students asked for longer here and we ended up with 30 minutes. I do think it’s important to not rush – this is where the core learning is taking place. During this time, experts discuss the assigned questions but get purposefully sidetracked with related interesting side-quests. For example, they will frequently want to check primary literature against a book author’s claim. (This is fine with me – this is also core to the learning process). I float around during this time and enthusiastically listen to their discussions.
Step 4: Teaching Fixed Groups. Following expert group debriefs, students reassemble into their fixed groups. Each student is given 5-10 min to explain their chapter to the rest of the group. Keep in mind that the other students in the fixed group have not read the chapter, so there are lots of questions and discussions. Students can use the preassigned questions as a start.
Step 5: Big Class Roundup. I try to save 10 minutes at the end of class for a debrief. My intent here is to develop global short themes for each chapter and discuss together how each chapter informs us on the course topic. (Full disclosure: We almost never have time for this, and it’s fine.)
My course runs twice a week for 90 minutes. I run Book Club roughly once every 2 weeks and it takes a whole class session. I will be the first to admit that this is a big cut to traditionally programmed teacher-delivered content, but the student engagement is phenomenal and well worth it. If you try a course Book Club, I’d love to hear how it goes!