Interest-Based Reading with a Purpose

I was scanning my Eduthusiasm Facebook feed, just about to leave it and get busy with my work-related "tasks at hand," when Curtis Chandler's name caught my eye in a post from ESSDACK. His stuff is always good, so I clicked. His article on "hunting and gathering" brought to the forefront a recurring query for me.

Recognizing that there are exceptions to this -- every situation has its specific needs -- I still cannot help but wonder: Why can't we have the students do the hunting and gathering along with or rather than the teacher?

Here's an alternate idea to gathering a bunch of specific pieces of literature and asking students to read them and identify their plots, characters, themes, and "lessons."

Use interests as ONE of your grouping criteria. Then have groups identify a topic of interest they all share. It might be a hobby, a career interest, a hero, a handicap or disease -- the possibilities are endless.

The assignment will be to develop an annotated bibliography of reading materials designed to educate people on the topic. It should include fiction and non-fiction, books, magazines, journals, websites of agencies/organizations, etc.

Then:

1. Have each group identify an upstanding organization associated with the group's specific interest. The teacher can then communicate with an official of the organization to partner with the group of students for the project.
2. Have the group Skype with the organization official to learn the org's purpose and activities. What kind of help does this org need? What knowledge does this org want people to have? What message does this org need to disseminate? Does this official know of books and other resources that are available to help people understand the issue/topic? Who can interested parties follow on Twitter to gain further insight?
3. The group then needs to use the official's recommendations to identify further resources.
4. Eventually, each student needs to bring his/her recommendations to the group regarding which literature to include in the group's final bib.
5. The group then needs to come to a consensus and complete a draft of its bib.
6. The group should then submit the draft to the org official, give him/her time to peruse it, then use Skype to discuss his/her recommendations for the group's consideration (items to leave in, take out; points to add in annotations; etc.).
7. The group decides on its revisions and then submits its final version, sharing it with the partnering org.
8. Is there a local org where the group could present its reading recommendations?

Lots of work to do before this gets to a classroom, but the idea here is interest-based reading and research with a purpose outside the classroom.