Steve Thomas: Stacy, welcome back to the podcast.
Stacy Brown: Thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Steve Thomas: So I had an opportunity late last year to come visit your school and got to see around. Can you just tell listeners a little bit about Davis Academy?
Stacy Brown: Absolutely, and we loved having you. The Davis Academy is the largest Reform Jewish Day School in the country. We serve about 500 students. We are on two campuses. They are very close together. They’re about a quarter mile apart. On our lower school campus, we have a kindergarten prep program which is called Mechina, which means “preparation” in Hebrew, and they serve four and five year olds. And then we have kindergarten through fifth grade on that same campus. And then down the street at our middle school, we are serving sixth through eighth graders.
I started at Davis a long time ago, about 18 years ago, when I was an infant. And when I started there, I started as the lower school librarian, and I was hired at the same time as a middle school librarian. So they were starting with a blank slate when I came on board. She has since gone on to work for DeKalb County for many years for the public library system, but we were out of a middle school librarian for a couple of years.
So while I was working as lower school librarian and after she left, I started kind of inching my way over to the middle school campus as well and kind of making some things happen there because it was a bit more dormant without a librarian present. So after doing that, I was able to make the case to hire another full time middle school librarian and really show this is what you can do with the library at the middle school.
Then I went back into my role as the lower school librarian solely and then iPads came out on the horizon and it really was the tipping point for technology integration and education. So after attending some really inspiring sessions at the Georgia Educational Technology Conference, I came back with a proposal for our head of school, and we did a very intentionally, very slowly, merging some of the more innovative technology at the time into our curriculum and doing a lot of research. We visited a ton of schools and I got so involved in that and invested in that, that our head of school decided, you know what, we need to hire another lower school librarian and put you into the role of 21st Century Learning Coordinator.
And I was actually in that role for at least 12 years, for a very long time, and while in that role, I have always been invested in learning. I love going to conferences. I love presenting at conferences. And I’m a curious person, so I would bring back all these ideas and theories and lessons to our own faculty, that eventually it became a natural gravitation for me to move into a professional development role that also encompassed supervising our libraries on both campuses and working with the educational technology for all of our faculty. So when I started at Davis, it was me, the middle school librarian, and then we had a part time assistant that was primarily at the lower school, but now we have a team of six on both campuses. We are all very busy, and we’ve really built up a very strong department that is absolutely the heart of the school. We have our hands in everything that happens in that school, and we are an integral part of just the day to day and the big picture and the strategic planning.
So alongside all of that, I wrote a book, my first book, which was the School Librarians Technology Playbook on all my experiences collaborating with teachers with regard to being a champion of the library and also focusing on technology integration with great intention, and then I started really after that book came out, I started thinking about the things that I love most about my job, and one of them has always been since I started at Davis and continues to be now, facilitating book clubs for our learning community. So that inspired me to write this newest book, Revolutionize Youth Book Club: Strategies for Meaningful and Fun Reading Experiences published by Bloomsbury.
Steve Thomas: And if you want to hear Stacy talk more about the other book, that’s episode 182. And it looks like we recorded that during the pandemic, ’cause that was May of 2020.
Stacy Brown: We did, we did.
Steve Thomas: Yes. But there’s a lot of great stuff in that one too.
And before we get into the book club book, can you talk about some of the creative projects that your students are working on using technology? You showed me a few pictures that you’d had posted online and you had some stuff set up in your office when I was there, just some of the things that they do that you and the library are involved in?
Stacy Brown: Sure. Yeah. So I’ll share a lower school example and a middle school example. So just yesterday we were working with our fifth grade students, all of them actually, within their individual class periods. They studied westward expansion in their social studies class. And after at the end of their unit, we thought it would be fun to do what I like to call hiding the vegetables in the cookies and we introduced a robotics activity for them, where what they do is they work in small teams of three to four students and they create a visual map of their sub-topic under the umbrella of westward expansion. So one example is the Oregon Trail, right? Or buying Alaska and Hawaii. And they create an informational map about that. Then each team gets a Sphero, which is a robotic ball that you can program using block coding. It’s programmed so that they have a matrix animation that mimics what is happening as they proceed forward throughout their map during their journey.
So one stop might be, they are starting in Independence, Missouri, and so their matrix is programmed to look like the shape of Missouri, and then they move forward and they stop at another place and the Sphero speaks the content that they program the Sphero to speak and their matrix animation changes to be relevant to what their the Sphero was talking about at that time. Then the Sphero rolls on to the next stop and so on throughout its entire journey. It is seriously so much fun. It teaches them coding skills. It teaches them research skills because they have to synthesize the information that they’ve learned to that date, teaches them teamwork, communication skills, and then they present their final product, and we invite in visitors to see those presentations so there’s also a public speaking element to it as well.
So that’s one way where we’re very intentional about collaborating with our teachers, making it fun, that is really important. That’s why that word is also on the cover of my new book as part of the title. It’s a huge selling point for kids of all ages.
Then another example of technology projects that we’ve done at the middle school is we finally were able to invest in acquiring a laser cutter sometime last year. That has actually inspired us to talk to the teachers about creative projects we can do together to make units more exciting. Sometimes I like to start at a place where maybe the teacher doesn’t love the topic they’re teaching or they have a harder time reaching the student. This example isn’t necessarily that, however, with our language arts teacher, she does a mystery project every year where the students read a mystery book of their choice, which we love that she’s so big on choices throughout her curriculum for students when they’re reading. They do read some common novels together, but she really tries to build in the choice for them. And then they have to figure out what would happen if they rewrote the ending or changed some of the variables in the story. So they write a whole essay, essentially. Then using the laser cutter they take acrylic and they create an illustration of the scene of what they wrote about, and then they take marker and it’s printed through the laser-cutter. Then they take marker so that they can color on the acrylic and really make it pop and stand out as though it was an illustration to accompany that portion of the book. And then using LED lights, they are able to light up the backdrop of that. So it’s really a fun project. We put it on display. It’s very impressive for those who come through and tour the pop-up exhibit of their creations. The students feel empowered that they were able to basically be authors themselves and put a new twist on something. It just brings the story to life in a new dynamic. So those are just two examples of some of the projects we’ve done with technology integration.
Steve Thomas: And I think the acrylics, I think that’s one of the ones that you had posted pictures of on your socials, so people can look at that, I think, right?
Stacy Brown: Oh, yes. So, prior to all the recent changes, I basically used that social media platform as a visual diary so that other people could get ideas from me and I could get other ideas from people. So all of that is still up there under @21stStacy and I have started inching my way onto Blue Sky. I post a little bit here and there on Instagram, but not quite as much. So I guess I’m making the transition now, but if you want to go back and see some of the older things that we’ve done prior to even this year, you can look at that on X.
Steve Thomas: Before you started writing the book, what kind of experience did you have running book clubs with your students?
Stacy Brown: When I moved to Atlanta, I didn’t know a lot of people, and so one person I knew through a friend of a friend from where I grew up, she invited me into her book club. And so personally, I had been in a book club the minute I came to Atlanta. And I loved it. I loved it because we had so many different people from different parts of the city. The one negative is I was driving far every month, but I loved that too, because I don’t know, you just got to see different parts of the city and how different people lived and we became very, very close. Nobody was married. Nobody had children. Everybody was pretty much single. And so we really got to know each other. And then as time passed and people started settling down with significant others and having kids, some of the players in the book club changed, but the book club never died. And so I have been in that same book club for probably close to 28 years now, because I was also in that when I was an infant. And there are a few of us who are original members of that book club.
When I started at Davis, one of the things that would happen is I would get, we had this very robust group of parent volunteers that would come in to shelve the books, and I didn’t know anybody really yet, and I wanted to make an effort to get to know people, and I would sort of eavesdrop on their conversations, these parents as they were talking and shelving, it was hard not to hear what they were saying, and one of the common themes, because of naturally where they were, was that they couldn’t get their children to want to read on their own time. I heard that especially from boy moms. And so I started to think about that. And I thought, well, you know what? I love being in a book club. There’s no reason I can’t start a book club here. So that is what I did. And I started a book club. And if I’m honest, I wouldn’t do it this way now, but at the time I started it by piloting it with boys, only fifth grade boys. And I realize now that that is not being very inclusive, and I changed very shortly thereafter, but that’s how I got started. We had about eight to 10 boys that were very sophisticated readers, and they came religiously every single month, and we would offer suggestions for what to read, I would offer some, they would offer some recommendations, and then we would vote, and then that is what we would read for the next month, and it was seriously so much fun, we would meet during lunch, I would bring a treat that tied into the theme of the book, they had to guess how it related to the book, and back then we were really just doing discussions, cause there wasn’t the makerspace concept in the way that we know it now. We were just coming together to socialize, have fun, eat a lunch and talk about this great book that we had just finished.
What happened was as a natural consequence, the girls got jealous and they were seeing the boys get to come into the library during lunch and they were like, well, we want to skip the dining hall and even recess too and have a book club. So then I launched a fifth grade girls book club and then the fourth graders got jealous. And so then before you know it, I had all these book clubs going all the way down to third grade, which, you know, sometimes that works well, sometimes it doesn’t. You have to be really strategic with the younger children, which I write about in the book, but from there, I really realized that I was changing the reading culture in our school.
Another thing I would notice is that our parents would also talk about their parenting trials and tribulations when they were in the library shelving books or volunteering in the book fair. So I was like, “Huh, you know what? We should have a parent book club.” So then I launched a parent book club and it had a big following. We would meet in the dining hall so as not to disrupt the library space and to be able to talk in a way that we weren’t having to really censor ourselves, and that was a wonderful, wonderful thing. I would prepare discussion questions and it was a great way for me to kind of integrate myself into the community and get to know the parents and them get to know me.
And then it was so fun that I was like, “We should have a faculty book club.” So we have over the years had numerous faculty book clubs as well, where we read the same book we discuss we do an activity and that’s a great way to create new bonds among faculty members who don’t necessarily come in contact with each other so often on a daily basis too. So I think there’s a morale building element to a faculty book club that is worth mentioning, and it’s really opened their eyes and just changed the way we think about certain things as a collective, as well as individually.
Steve Thomas: With the Faculty Book Club, are you reading adult books or are you reading kid books? What are you reading there?
Stacy Brown: Great question. So we typically read adult books. We have read some young adult books, but they’re typically adult, and they don’t always have blatant messages about education, but you can relate them back to education in some way. Every book that we read, there is some takeaway from it that will help you as an educator, whether it’s how you communicate with parents or how you sympathize or empathize within your classroom, how you relate to your students.
Many years ago, for example, we read The Circle by Dave Eggers, which is really about just too much technology. And so again, kind of reinforcing the concept of being intentional. When we have indoor recess, we’re not just going to put an iPad in front of the kids, right? When it’s raining outside, we’re going to pull out Monopoly or some other game, Rummikub, where they’re using their brains and socializing in a different way, as opposed to playing video games or something like that. So I would not say that that is necessarily classified as a teaching book or even a parenting book and it’s fiction, but we were able to relate it back to our professional lives in our discussion.
Steve Thomas: That’s great. It’s good that you’re able to involve so many different groups within the school. And how many book clubs are you running currently?
Stacy Brown: Currently, I have… okay, so I have merged some of our book clubs together. So my book clubs now are pretty big. I have typically at least 25 students in a book club. So right now I have one big lower school book club. I have one middle school book club. And then I have just wrapped up a parenting book club with the book, The Five Principles of Parenting, because we have the author, Dr. Aliza Pressman, she’s a child psychologist, she’s coming to our school in March, so we wanted to kind of get the conversation started early, and then I am doing a faculty book club about the same exact book also in preparation for Dr. Pressman’s visit. So I would say at any given time, four, which is a lot. However, now I do use AI as a tool to help me with some of my time management because if I need to come up with an activity that will be engaging for the students, and I’m really having a mental block on what that can be, I will put a question into ChatGPT or Claude, and I’ll use that as a launch pad to come up with some ideas, and then I usually put my own spin on it, but it helps me just get my thinking started about what would they enjoy doing for a specific age group.
I also tap into the students as well, because we have student leaders who are library ambassadors on both of our campuses. So they help me, especially at the middle school level. They drive a lot of the activities that we do that are associated with our book clubs, or anything related to the library in general, but AI has actually been a huge help for me, even with regard to the treat, like, you know, if I make it clear the book that we read, what are some treat ideas, I’ve gotten some amazing suggestions, and then again, sometimes they’re not realistic, so I will modify them or simplify them, but at least it gets me going in the right direction.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, I, I tend to, at this point in its development, I think of AI, or LLMs, at the Wikipedia level, that it’s a place to get started, but it’s not a place to end at all. Like you have to check and you have to go put your own creative spin on it, but it’s a place just to get that boring part of brainstorming out of the way, basically.
Stacy Brown: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Steve Thomas: So then what made you want to write the book on book clubs? I mean, was it just, you’re having such a good experience on it?
Stacy Brown: Yeah, so when I have conversations with other library professionals, sometimes I pick up on there’s a fear of facilitating a book club because, you know, the word “club” maybe can sometimes be intimidating and there’s a worry like I don’t have enough time, I’m already spread thin, I have no resources or very limited resources, and so the motivator for writing the book was hoping that library professionals will see book clubs as something that they can create magic from nothing, right?
So it doesn’t matter if you have a low or no budget. I have experienced that firsthand because before I was at Davis, I worked at an academic in a college at an academic library and I had no budget, no budget whatsoever. And we did some incredible book club activities and would invite local authors in to speak at our book club, which they were motivated because even though I wasn’t able to give them a stipend, they were getting practice and speaking about their book and networking, so they were willing to do it and really they got something out of it as well. So just understanding that if you can tap into creativity and all you need to have is the mental willingness, you can create an awesome book club from scratch with very little support. You just have to have a sense of fun.
And I also talk about this in the book, but really not be so focused on rules and policies, and it has to be this way. It can’t be that way. There has to be a flexible mindset to facilitate a successful book club because the minute it feels like a chore or like something that the students have to do a certain kind of way, it does take the fun out of it, and it becomes more robotic and less of their own innate desire to want to participate and socialize and join in the fun.
So my goal is for the library professionals to really understand that they, no matter what their role is, even if they’re a library volunteer, they have the power to create an amazing book club experience.
Steve Thomas: Yeah. And I think it’s important that, “facilitate” I think is a good word for it, because you’re not just coming in and imposing this thing and you have this strict list of questions and we’re going to talk about these and that’s it. You’re facilitating a conversation, like you want them to be involved in the whole thing. It’s not just you running it on your own. So that can also take off some of the burden from you as well that you don’t have to be overly-prepared. I mean, you want to be prepared, but like you don’t have to be worrying about every second of what’s going to happen.
Stacy Brown: Absolutely. And another strategy, which I also mentioned in the book is, you know, public libraries now, a lot of them offer book club kits for all ages so if you don’t have the resources to supply books for kids, sometimes you can turn to your public library. But another favorite way is to do a genre book club and everyone reads their own book within a specific genre, and then when you come together, you’re exposing the kids to so many different books as opposed to just one, and they also feel kind of ownership over the book that they chose to read and are now sharing with other peers, and you can do some really creative activities under that umbrella as well, so it doesn’t really need to fall within a certain structure or system in order for a book club to be successful.
Steve Thomas: And when you’re launching a book club like that, you’re going to get those kids who are your enthusiastic readers going, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I want to jump in. I want to do this!” But how can you make it more appealing to your reluctant readers and have them want to participate more in a book club?
Stacy Brown: So it has to kind of also have a little bit of a cool factor to it. And the way that happens is through the emphasis on socialization and fun and food. And again, with regard to budgeting, the food does not need to be something that is costly. My best things that tie into the theme of the book that are treats the students can enjoy come from the dollar store, and then I always have like a big bag of Starbursts on hand for the kids who do have food allergies as a “just in case” so that if it’s something they can’t eat, maybe they have a dairy allergy and we’re doing something, I don’t know, milk and cookies or something, they don’t feel left out because really thinking about all those angles and making it as inclusive as possible is a huge selling point too, and it takes away the nerves that someone might have associated with it.
Also, I overly emphasize that there really aren’t any rules except for being respectful if someone else is speaking, like letting them have the floor because when they’re speaking, they would want the same treatment. I kind of treat it in the same model as an ed camp, where people can show up for a session. They don’t have to come to every session that is offered on a certain topic. So with regard to the book club, if they want to participate in December, but sit out January because maybe they are not feeling it, they have too much going on in their personal life, they don’t want an extra book to read, they don’t like the book that we voted to read, there is no harm done there at all. No pressure whatsoever, just making it a very respectful environment. That’s where the emphasis is placed so that kids feel comfortable.
Same thing, if they haven’t finished the book and they come to me and they’re timid about it, I’m like, “Oh, don’t worry about it. Just come engage in the conversation as you can and the activity.” And honestly, nine times out of ten, they are so enamored by the enthusiasm that is happening among the participants, they go home and they do finish the book. They just couldn’t do it by the time of the book club and that’s okay. We just want them to come and be exposed and join in our program and make friends, so I think that that’s what it’s about.
Steve Thomas: That’s great. And how do you come up with the ultimate title that you’re going to read? Do you take their suggestions? And I mean, I assume you have your own suggestions. Does it have to be something that’s in your library as well so they can check it out?
Stacy Brown: No, it does not. We do have a great selection. However, it does not have to, because sometimes a book comes out and then we want to do it the very next day, you know, we vote to read it. So what I do is I bring about four suggestions to the book club. So at the very end when we have finished everything and it’s certainly an incentive for staying until the end, I post an image of all the book covers and then I hyperlink either a well-done book trailer or a summary of the book, and we share out those suggestions and then I open the floor for recommendations. Sometimes they have some, sometimes they don’t.
I really, though, do try to discourage students from recommending a book they’ve already read because I want it to be new and exciting for them. I don’t outlaw it, but I do say, you know, “Why don’t you find a book in the same genre or that looks as appealing to you so it’s a new novel experience for you too?” Then we’ll vote. And that looks different for each one. I mean, I gauge my audience members, if I feel like they’re young enough where they’re going to be influenced by what people are voting for around them, then I’ll do like, eyes closed or heads down and just put your hand in the air. I’ve done it where we do it only on paper, and nobody can see what anyone else is writing and then they turn the paper into me and then after the book club, I tally the results. But that’s usually how we select the book.
And the way I come up with them is I peruse our collection. I look through professional journals, things that have just come out that look really interesting to me. Every now and then I’ll tap into an old favorite. There are a handful of books that I’ve repeated a couple of times. I don’t do that often, but they have really stuck with me for some reason. Maybe they were interesting and just very unique and I think that our kids will like it or maybe it was fabulous, and I don’t think it got the praise it deserved. I feel like it’s a hidden gem, and so I’ll bring it back to the book club a few years later. But I do have to wait a number of years so that there’s no overlap with students.
Steve Thomas: And you talk in the book about the importance of, like, naming and branding book clubs. Can you talk about the importance of that part of the equation?
Stacy Brown: Yes. So, first I’ll mention marketing. So many of us, when we were in library school, we did not necessarily take a marketing class. I think now, going through library school, that is more prevalent. However, for many of us who have been in the profession for a number of years, that was not part of our learning. During the pandemic, I did teach a marketing class to graduate students at the University of Washington’s iSchool and through that, I also learned quite a bit myself, not through just my research, but also through my students, some of which were currently marketing professionals and had some really interesting perspectives.
I basically integrated some of that into my book as well. I think there are some important distinctions for all library professionals to be aware of when it comes to marketing. They have to consider how to reach their target audience, how they can gather data from their target audience in a variety of different ways so that they reach not just one subgroup, but everyone that they’re trying to reach. Even thinking in the first place about who their target audience is, and what communication platforms for advertising events will be most effective. And learning also about usage habits among different age groups that they are targeting, I think, is really important.
A lot of us confuse advocacy with marketing. And while advocacy is certainly an important component of that, it’s just a subset of marketing. So I think that all of that is important first to lay the foundation for, and then we get into thinking about how do we want people to perceive our book club brand, right? What do we need that to look like? What is our identity? Who are we trying to attract? And so, one year, not very long ago, I created a logo for the middle school book club using Canva, and I named it Word, and we’re not doing video for this podcast, but I had a graphic of an individual who has kind of got their hands folded across their chest and their hand on their chin, and I wrote “WORD” in big letters across that graphic, and my son who was actually in middle school at the time and his friends made so much fun of it. So I missed my mark there, right?
So I didn’t follow my own advice and it was a great reminder: you’ve got to get the kids involved in creating your brand, thinking about how you’ll be perceived, what word choices you use. I never use the M word. I never say the word “meeting” ever. I will say “event” if I need a word to accompany a book related program. So like for our faculty book club on Tuesday, I have not once said the word “meeting” and I’m very intentional about that in my written and verbal communication because that just right away puts a negative spin on it, and I want to paint the picture of active engagement and really ownership of what’s going to happen during the book club. So I get into all of the details that help create that kind of an image to create a successful book club experience in the book throughout actually several of the chapters, because it really does overlap into several different topics regarding a book club.
Steve Thomas: In the book, you have a lot of examples that people can follow, which I think is really good resources, including QR codes that people can go to slides and things like that. Do you usually have a slideshow as part of your book club for people to go through? Can you talk about that element of it?
Stacy Brown: Absolutely. So in the book, I refer to it as a book club blueprint. It’s really selfish of me because I use a book club blueprint, not necessarily for the participants. It’s really for me as my roadmap to keep me on track because we have a finite amount of time and I want to make sure we get to do all the fun things that are planned during that time together. So I use either Canva or Google Slides and I will create a slideshow from a template that I’ve been using month after month, but it looks completely different each time. So you have this consistent framework, but because the variables are so different. Each time you come together, the participants may be different. The book you read is different. The activity you’re going to do is different. The discussion you’re going to have is different. The treat you’re going to enjoy is different.
It’s really hard for someone in the audience who comes every single month to identify that this is the same template, everything looks different, but for you, the facilitator, it’s really your time saver, it helps you stay organized, and it helps you kind of, it takes away all the stress, actually, because you have a strong, solid foundation to follow.
I do project those onto a screen when we come together, just because it helps me, and that way they can see the questions that I’ve created for us to discuss or even some of the students have created ahead of time. Because some of us, like we get distracted by what the person across the room is doing and we can’t process the question we hear, but we want to participate in the conversation so also having it visually up on the board is super helpful. And then I add an element of fun to our activity, which I also integrate into the slide. Sometimes I’ll call it, like if we read a spy novel, “You are now tasked with the mission of creating 3D night vision binoculars. These are your supplies…” so it just allows them to have a visual in their minds as well, but it also helps me keep us on track and make sure we don’t miss a beat. So yes, that is something that I do do through throughout every single book club.
And then it also is great because on those few occasions where I am repeating a book years later, I can go back to my slideshow and I will update it or change it because the times have changed. Maybe the activity doesn’t hit the same way now that it did back then, but at least I have something to work off of. And it’s a great record just for myself so I can go back and see what we’ve done and remember, “Oh, this one was such a fun one that we all seemed to enjoy.”
Steve Thomas: And do you, as the teacher leader of the group, do you read the book before you choose it or once it’s chosen then you read it so like you’re going into it blind as well, somewhat.
Stacy Brown: Yes, so I am going into it blind, so I really do rely on the reviews from fellow librarians if I have not read the book yet. Sometimes I’ve read the book, but that cannot be the case for every book that I put out there. I mean, sometimes it’s literally just come off the press, but I think it’s going to be so good, or we’re familiar already with that author, right? Like we’re reading Faker by Gordon Korman right now, and we’ve read several of his books over the years. We’ve had him come to our school. So that one I actually didn’t read beforehand, but I read the reviews and then when I shared the summaries of all the options with the kids and then they provided their own recommendations, that was the one that was voted on, so I’m reading it with them.
I just think we have to be realistic with ourselves. We love to read or we wouldn’t be in our jobs, but the truth is we have so many responsibilities. So again, that’s just one more way to take some of the pressure off of yourself. It’s more about doing your homework and relying on each other, our professional network, to help us figure out what the hot new literature is and what we anticipate our kids might enjoy. But like everyone who works in a library, over the last several years, we’ve really tightened up our reconsideration policy and process so we’re ready if we get some pushback on something. We’ve had pushback before, but when we explain the process, they never really go through the act of filling out the paperwork or most times they actually haven’t read the book themselves. So it’s never really come to anything, but we have all of our ducks in a row should we encounter that at this stage, which I anticipate at some point we will.
Steve Thomas: Yeah. But like you said, most things that you are reading, you have a copy of in your library. So you’ve already vetted it at some degree already, and especially if it’s something like Gordon Korman, you know what you’re going to get from Gordon Korman.
Stacy Brown: Right, and, you know, Dan Gutman, some of the old favorites, they come out with a new book and we’re immediately intrigued, right? Because we know them, we love what they put out typically. We use Follett Destiny and I do enjoy reading the reviews that they curate within that system, because there are a number of different sources that they’ve compiled together, and sometimes they contradict each other, the reviews, and I make note of that as well, especially when I’m targeting a specific age group, there’s sometimes some gray as to what would be appropriate for a certain age level and it’s subjective, right? So I have to use my judgment. I have to know my community. And the truth is that changes from year to year, depending on what our school community is like in any given year, you have to have a pulse on that. Some years I’ve been much more conservative than others, but again, communication is critical.
So with our younger students, I sent out a Google form to parents, as well as students before any book club, and I give them the opportunity to register and to learn about the book that has been selected. I also emphasize that the students have chosen the book. I’m not trying to push any specific material on our students. It’s really driven by the participants and that allows the parents to be kept in the loop and also help me encourage their kid to participate. So it’s not just me always advocating for their participation. Sometimes the parents can help me and be a cheerleader.
Also, the way our book club is structured right now, our lower school, we have our book clubs early in the morning before their typical school day starts so I need the partnership of the parents because they are the ones getting their children to school early for our bus riders, I just say, if that’s a day you cannot drive your child to school, sometimes they will to get them out of the routine so that they can attend on time. When you can, just come straight in when you get to school from the bus, just showing them that you want to work with them but you’re flexible, helps them be flexible and accepting, but really it builds trust.
Steve Thomas: Well, thinking of it in terms of like the personal book club you’ve been in, what, almost 30 years since you were a toddler when you first started in there, what is it that you like about being in a book club? What do you get out of it just being a participant, not as a leader, but just as a member of a book club?
Stacy Brown: So I think it’s human nature to have insecurities, and so I feel like a book club is a way to quiet some of the voices in our head that we may not feel great about when it comes to ourselves because a book club encourages conversation. It exposes you to different people who may think differently than you in a very civilized environment. Books are safe ways of talking about difficult topics under the guise of somebody else, right? Like you can lean into the characters or the subject and explore topics that don’t totally feel comfortable, that you might be curious about, and build community and camaraderie in a way that when you leave, you feel like a little bit of a hole was filled up inside you. And so, that is it right there, that is where the magic happens.
Steve Thomas: And hopefully that’s something that you’re building in the ones that you’re doing for your students, that they’re feeling that way. And obviously the school one, you’re trying to, again, sneak those veggies in with the fun as well. There’s something educational about it as well, but a lot of it is just, as you said, you wanted to put in the title of the book, the fun part of it, and that’s a big, important part of it.
Stacy Brown: Right, and as the facilitator, you do have great power, and I talk about this in the book, but one of the very key components there is to really read the room. So if someone comes in, they kind of do a dance because they can’t figure out where to sit, and you can just see them questioning everything, you can kind of help them along or, you know, I’ve had kids, they come up to me, maybe I’m talking to someone before the book club starts and they come up very quietly, like they need to tell, tell me something or ask me something and they’re very worried about something. Like maybe they don’t want to talk out loud or they haven’t finished the whole book yet, whatever it is that’s bothering them, I make a point of making them feel so comfortable that the next second that they have forgotten that worry.
That’s a really big component. So I never call on anyone. I let people show up for book club however they want to show up. I meet them where they are. And so reading the room is a really great responsibility that the book club facilitator has to help kids build confidence so that by the second, third book club, they don’t even think about those things anymore.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, and we know this in the library profession, a lot of the biggest book lovers are very introverted, so they need that time to just get used to the crowd around them, because it may be that, they’re not in class with some of these other kids, so they don’t know them very well, or they know them by sight, you know, that’s Billy, or that’s Sally, but they don’t really know them, but it’s also just a good community building tool too, because now they get to know Billy, and they’ll get to know Sally.
Stacy Brown: Exactly. Absolutely.
Steve Thomas: Okay. And then, what are you reading now maybe for your personal book club, what are you guys reading?
Stacy Brown: Oh, we are reading The Frozen River, and I haven’t started it yet. It’s historical fiction. We just read another historical fiction book called The Outlaw Noble Salt, which is like a twist on The Sundance Kid. And it was really good. We all enjoyed it. I don’t think we all thought we would enjoy it. It made actually a lot of the people want to go back and learn more about Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which was an unexpected outcome.
But we read pretty much anything and everything. We actually all have very different tastes. I think that’s important to mention. We have one person who really just wants to read spicy romance, which is not really what I want to read. I want to read contemporary fiction. So we all take one for the team from time to time and just, we plow through it, and we always have riveting discussions.
Steve Thomas: Stacey, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast, and I hope people get the book and can use it to help improve their book club, start a book club, whatever they want to do there. And if they wanted to get in touch with you, how could they ask follow up questions of you?
Stacy Brown: Oh yes, I absolutely encourage that. I love to engage with readers or even just anyone who is feeling trepidation about launching or revitalizing a book club. So my email is stacybrownreads[at]gmail[dot]com.
Steve Thomas: Well, thank you so much, Stacy, and have a great day.
Stacy Brown: Thank you.
Circulating Ideas 