Option #3 (Speed Dating)

With regards to my last post, I want to expand upon some ideas for using the library for free choice.

First, just telling a group of high school students to "go find a book to read" might not work with most teenagers. Why not? Well, too many will go for the shortest book they can find, or they fall prey to judging a book by it's cover art. Others will find a book that has been turned into a movie in hopes they can just watch the movie. Still others will wander a collection with 23,000 books (of which half are fiction) and claim they "couldn't find one that was interesting."

This means students need to be guided into making a personalized selection. One way is through an activity called "speed dating." The classroom teacher administers an interest survey to the students. From this, the most popular genres can be pulled by the librarian. Tables are set up in stations, one per student, with two books per station. (It does help to have different genres paired together.)

When the students sit at the stations, they have paper with them on which they record the title, 1-2 sentences to help remember the book, and a rating. It could be how many stars out of five or a scale of one to ten. They are given two minutes per station to choose a book from the pair to speed date before moving to the next station.

At the end of the time allotted, even if students don't rotate to every station, station numbers are randomly drawn for book selection time. For instance, if number eight is drawn, the student at that station looks at their ratings sheet and selects their top choice to check out. Then another number is drawn for that student to make a selection and so on. No student ends up with "the last book" since plenty will still be on the tables at the end.

Students have been very receptive as teachers have begun moving towards this activity. To help keep them on track, since the books are of varying lengths, one English teacher devised a bookmark of days and helps her students divide the number of pages to determine a minimum daily page goal.

One concluding activity we will be working on, hopefully, is to have students film short reviews using the green screen.

Other options for student choice can be "Blind Dates" where the books are wrapped with paper and short descriptions are placed on the paper.

The genre-fying of the fiction collection is another way to facilitate student choice by giving them an organization more like a book store.