Debbie Light and Mel Aberson share the Twitter account @TeacherTweaks. They are passionate about teaching and learning and their first book ‘Lesson Planning Tweaks for Teachers’ was published by Bloomsbury in June 2015.
their investment of time by being able to keep the books, but if the budget is really tight, perhaps you could buy a smaller number of each book and have a couple of smaller book groups that run on a rotation basis? That way, when they books are finished with they could end up in the library for other interested staff to refer to. Perhaps if this is the model you decide is best for your school, you could allow each book group member to choose their favourite book to keep at the end of the year. An alternative to keep the cost down might be to team up with a couple of local schools and agree to each buy a couple of sets of books that are shared between the three schools. 3. Structure: If you’ve never been part of a book group, you may not know how they tend to work. You need enough people to get a decent discussion going without getting out of hand; we’d suggest between 8 and 15. It is also recommended that there are questions prepared in advance of the meeting to focus the discussion. We started off providing these ourselves for the group, but found it better to ask members to submit their own questions a week or two before the meeting. 4. Rules: This can be a tricky one. The idea of setting up the group is that the members are agreeing to commit to reading a book per half term or term but this has not always been possible. Staff may leave, take on a new responsibility or just not stick with it and this can be quite frustrating for whoever is leading the group. It isn’t possible to avoid this completely, but it may be better to order the books after each meeting rather than buying them all in at the start of the year. We have also made a point of ensuring that the meetings are arranged and books distributed with a holiday available, for those people who don’t read as much during term time. It is also helpful to send out a reminder email a couple of weeks before the meeting for those last minute crammers!
Read our review of Debbie’s and Mel’s book at ukedchat.com/magazine/july-2015/8
5. Book selection: This can be the most fun aspect but it is worth doing a bit of research before choosing your book each time. You may want to take into account the particular development priorities in your school, the areas of interest of your group members or the type of book that you read previously. As mentioned above, you may wish to order the books throughout the year and this can give you a chance to ask your book group to vote on the next book they would like to read. 6. Sharing: Think about how you can share the findings from the book group. This is a fantastic opportunity to ask book group members to write a short article for a staff bulletin, post resources on a sharing board or even to ask people to run a short CPD session (like the Fifteen Minute Forum discussed by @shaun_allison in his fab book ‘Perfect Teacherled CPD’ bit.ly/ukedperfectcpd). Another really effective strategy is setting up a blog for the book group so that staff can share their thoughts on the books with the rest of the school. See reviews of CPD books at
ukedchat.com/category/book ukedchat.com/magazine 09