What happened at the seventh book club meeting?

Dear all,

We had a great book group meeting this past week to discuss Beyond Discipline by Alfie Kohn -- so great, in fact, that it has taken me several days to process all my notes and try to synthesize everything we covered. Patti, Sonia, Michelle, Jake, Katherine, Cherith, Sheila, Betsy and I had a passionate and wide-ranging conversation. Here are some of the highlights:

* We noticed that one of the great things about reading this book was seeing how naturally it fit with some of our previous books, namely How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Choice Words. All three books ask us as educators to think about the ways in which we speak to and interact with children, and to consider the ways that what we say and what we do reflects certain beliefs about children. All three books, but this one in particular, push us to reflect upon whether those beliefs are the ones we truly hold and want to project, or whether we need to work on making our words and actions more consistent with how we view children.

* The most commonly repeated comment during our book club discussion was that many of us feel "paralyzed" by the ideas in this book – we agree with a lot of what Kohn says, but we don't know where to start. One thing we talked about at book club was giving ourselves permission to take on some of his ideas without necessarily committing to going full steam ahead – this would make it more manageable. In particular, the one underlying concept we felt we could take on was that of asking ourselves about the subtext of what we do in our classrooms. When we set policies in our classrooms or set up structures, we can ask ourselves, "What is this for?" and make sure that our reasons go beyond the desire to set ourselves up as authority figures in the classroom.

* We also spent a lot of time talking about Kohn's emphasis on community. We talked about that in terms of classroom community and school-wide community. In terms of the classroom community, we generally liked what he was saying but had some questions about the implementation as he describes it. Again, we gave ourselves permission to be influenced by Kohn's ideas without necessarily having to take on all of them! In terms of school-wide community, we talked about the importance of having a shared and articulated philosophy among all staff members so that students were getting a consistent message. This might mean setting aside time as a staff to talk about our philosophies.

* We noticed that many members of the eighth grade team had now read all three of our last books and have been (both individually and collectively) experimenting with some of the ideas from them. One proposal was that they could perhaps present what they've tried and how it's worked either at the end of this year or at the beginning of next year.

These notes don't even begin to do justice to the thoughtful, passionate discussion we had, and I apologize to people who were there for all the things I'm sure I inadvertantly left out.

In terms of a new book & date: many people had to leave by the time we started this discussion. For that reason, if you have any suggestions for a different and/or date, please do a "reply all" and say so, but do it by this Wednesday. Otherwise, if there are no objections, here's the info for next time:

Date: Tuesday, May 1st
Time: 4:30 PM
Place: TBD
Book: A Mind at a Time by Mel Levine

(This book came out of the suggestion to focus mainly on children, not teachers, in our next book. Thank you to Leslie for suggesting Mel Levine.)

So, mark your calendars and start reading! Hope to see you next time!

Pauline