Back to all

Dive into the transformative journey of establishing a professional learning community within your school by starting a professional book club. Uncover the essential steps, from generating interest to fostering engaging discussions, and witness the growth of shared knowledge and collaboration. This blog post is your guide to cultivating a culture of continuous learning, building relationships, and collectively enhancing literacy in your school.

Ready to take the lead in establishing a professional book club within your school? Explore the following six steps that make starting a book club a breeze.

1. Generate Interest: Building a Professional Learning Community

Let staff members know you are thinking about starting a book club. You could introduce this idea via email or at a staff meeting. When introducing a book club, let staff members know it is optional and that it will be fun to learn together! Try to get different roles involved in your building. Administrators, speech language pathologists, librarians, instructional assistants, and teachers will bring various perspectives to conversations, and including different roles will promote a culture of literacy and increase common knowledge amongst participants. You could even invite your district elementary language arts director or superintendent! 

2. Pick Your Book: Choosing the Right Books for Your PLC Book Club

If you are thinking of starting your own book club, you might already have a book or topic in mind based on school wide data or school goals. If not, try to utilize voice and choice amongst participants by asking for book suggestions and then sending out a survey to finalize the selection. Participants will be more engaged during meetings if the content of the book is relevant to their teaching and current professional development goals. 

3. Create a Schedule: Organizing and Scheduling Book Club Meetings

Finding a common time for all staff members to meet can be challenging. Sending out a poll is an easy way to see when participants would be available to meet. Once you decide on how many times to meet, divide the text into manageable chunks. For our Writing Rope book club, we settled on reading two chapters and then meeting bimonthly to discuss. Your building might decide they want to meet less frequently but discuss more chapters, perhaps on professional development days.

4. Plan: Structuring Your PLC Book Club Sessions

The book club leader should lead at least the first discussion and create guiding questions that are shared with participants before the meeting. Many professional books already have book club guides with questions for each chapter so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel (see here for Joan Sedita’s The Writing Rope book study guide). These guides are a great jumping off point, but it is important to also create questions that are geared towards your district and building. This will make the discussion more lively and meaningful! After the first meeting, encourage participants to bring their own questions for discussion.  For our Heggerty book club, I created questions that led participants to make connections between the topics presented in The Writing Rope and our upcoming Bridge to Writing curriculum.

5. Meet: Facilitating Engaging Discussions in Your Book Club

Start each meeting with an icebreaker (and maybe snacks?). Our book club meetings are a chance for people from different teams to get to see each other, so I always schedule some time to just chat and catch up. For the first meeting, your club might want to discuss expectations, norms, and the schedule. If you have more than 12 participants, you might decide to break into smaller groups to provide more opportunities for participation. Have groups talk about the prepared questions but also be flexible in the conversation. Sometimes, we don’t get to all the discussion prompts that I prepared and that’s okay! 

I recommend leaving each meeting with implementation action items to complete. The goal for a literacy book club should be to apply our learning to increase students’ competence as readers and writers. To promote this application, you could pose the question, “What’s one thing you might do differently as a result of our discussion today?” During the next meeting, participants could report back on the new thing they tried in their instruction.

6. Next Steps: Professional Learning Community Implementation

Starting a literacy initiative, such as a book club, is a large undertaking, but sustaining one is an even greater challenge! To keep the momentum going, ask for feedback and suggestions from participants. To keep the club feeling fresh, include different media every once in a while, like podcasts or clips of webinars. After you have finished your first book club, and your next book is chosen, let your staff know about your selection and welcome new members to the club! Know that attendance will vary based on schedules and interest in the chosen book. 

If you start a book club at your school, I would love to hear what you are reading and how it is going in the comments below! 

TIP: Don’t have a lot of time? Try these steps but with a podcast club, webinar club, or article club (see suggestions at the end of this article)! 

Benefits of Professional Learning Communities

  • Builds common knowledge across grade bands and with different staff members
  • Creates a culture of learning and growth throughout your school and district
  • Increases shared leadership amongst staff members 
  • Fosters new relationships at work with colleagues you might not get the chance to normally talk to
  • Helps you and your colleagues work towards a common goal of improving literacy in your building
  • Provides the opportunity to learn from the experts next door and from colleagues who know your school‘s needs
  • Increases knowledge of research-based practices throughout your building 

 Ready to dive into more learning? Take a peek at some of our Professional Learning Community resources:

Headshot photo of Janine Henley

Janine Henley, M.Ed

Janine is currently a Literacy Specialist at Heggerty. Before joining Heggerty, she served as a classroom teacher, reading specialist, and literacy coach. Janine holds a Master’s degree in Elementary Education from the University of Mary Washington and earned her reading specialist endorsement from the University of Virginia. Trained in Orton Gillingham, she has worked with diverse grade levels, spanning from K-8, showcasing her passion for education.

Leave a Comment