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Notebook Connections: Strategies For The Reader's Notebook (2009)

by Aimee Buckner(Favorite Author)

4.07 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

1571107827 (ISBN13: 9781571107824)

languge

English

genre

Nonfiction

publisher

Stenhouse Publishers

review 1: Where her first book Notebook Know-How centered on the writer’s notebook, Buckner shifts her attention to the reader’s notebook, and how reading like a writer, and writing about that heightens both student interest and learning. In essence, all the mini-lessons and strategies she outlines reinforce the old adage of reading like a writer, and even its inverse, writing like a reader. Although I’m personally a huge fan of her philosophy and pedagogy – in an ideal classroom, that is – I am wary of the overambitious and all-too-broad mini-lessons. Some may call it a whole language approach, which I believe does not adequately serve lower socio-economic and English language learners as effectively as intended and implemented per se. That is, the students she works with... more here are predominantly middle-class white kids in suburban Georgia. Not only is this a little acknowledged bias on her part, but also on the part of the publisher and the districts who buy this kind of book to give schools like mine, who serves lower-income Hispanic, black, white, and Asian Americans. As much as I love the kind of thinking that she details in this remarkable concise professional development tool, I have serious reservations. Do these exact strategies, as delivered as open-ended as she writes them, serve my students best? Case in point: The dearth of explicit vocabulary and grammar instruction does not address or lessen the vocabulary gap between my students and hers; which I would argue is necessary in order to help my students be on par with hers. That is, the best well-crafted strategy lessens can fall on deaf ears if they don’t have the academic vocabulary in the first place to understand what you’re talking about. In short, I would argue that my time and efforts are better spent reading tried-and-true pedagogy that addressees the very different needs to English language learners and those entering in our public school system whose vocabularies are significantly truncated the moment the walk in the Kindergarten door on day one of their K-12 education.However, there are some gems that are useful here in these pages which transcend the socio-economic backgrounds of our nation’s students. One such is her Fab Five Summaries, which is singularly the best of its kind I’ve every come across. (And most teachers would readily admit that summaries are often the most monstrous of beasts that can turn kids into regurgitation machine with ten too many superfluous details, and which often don’t make much sense.)And then there is her reprinting of Brian Cambourne’s Conditions of Learning – a theoretical model that combines many truisms that any teacher would agree with. However, I do have reservations in regards to how his conditions – all of which I agree with in theory – are limited by students’ socio-economic background. That is, the notions of expectations, responsibility, employment, and approximation can and are used in schools, but can be absent in their lives outside school; which in turn thwarts the best and well-intentioned efforts of teachers who serve lower socio-economic students, particularly if the latter come from generational (versus situational) poverty. What works in a school setting can looks completely useless for life at large for our hardest to reach kids, as their world does not operate by the same rules, assumptions, means, and ends.Fortunately, Buckner’s book is an easy and enjoyable read, and its limitations do not detract from the genuinely high-quality and higher-thinking strategies that she effectively details with examples from real students and their work. Skip that enormous Fountas & Pinnell tome, Guiding Readers and Writers, and spend an afternoon (as opposed to many months) reading this. Trust me: You will get more bang for your buck -- and time.
review 2: This has been a wonderful "serious" read this summer. I worked on some of her strategies personally in my own "beginning" notebook, and it really opened my eyes to some of my own beliefs about reading.She has constructed an interesting approach to specifically getting students to write about their comprehension/what their thinking about as they read.Although written for older students, I am excited to dabble with some of these ideas with my younger students. less

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