Our conversation started out in a dreamy sort of way:Two English teachers huddled around a table in the library, musing about a world where students gush and gab about literature the way they gush and gab about Netflix.
“There’s a small group of them,” the other English teacher told me, “who can’t wait to talk about books.”
She paused, letting that sink in.
“I’ve heard them,” she added and I grinned at the image, recalling a few flashes of the very same sort of memory. “They really do exist.”
We both laughed, but beneath the melodramatic sarcasm, that world is one we do want and every single day, we do what we can to try to create it.
For Orloff, creating that world involves a lot of different elements, elements she teaches, explores or develops day-to-day in her Freshman Literature and Composition classes. But beyond the skills and her flair for teaching them, it also involves a personal commitment to elevate student voices from a private page to a public one.
It all started out the way many things start out: as an assignment on paper.
Orloff offered her students the opportunity to select a choice book and when they completed that book, she taught them how to evaluate it. She explained what they needed to include in a book review, and then she turned them loose to write.
When she sat down to grade their reviews, she kept thinking, ‘why should I be the only one getting all of the book recommendations?’”
And in that moment, an idea was borne.
Orloff began uploading the book reviews onto a blog, and shared three classes worth of writing with the world. Through the process, Orloff realized how time intensive it was for her to maintain, so she sought out help from UAHS Librarian Judy Deal and instructional leader Alexa Stazenski. Deal and Stazenski not only helped Orloff upload the reviews, but they helped her figure out how to tag them and organize them.
As the process unfolded further, Orloff kept coming back to the idea that the authors and the audience should be kids, and kids should be designing what the blog looks like. So last year Orloff asked Deal if she could approach the high school book club. There, she pitched her idea, and Katie Z. and Hannah S. stepped up and took the reigns.
These two students transferred all of the entries from a novice Blogger site to a more professional looking Wordpress site. They choose images and fonts and as new entries come in, the two editors handle uploading them.
In addition, to get out the word about the entries, they’ve made QR coded bookmarks for every single student reviewed book in the high school library. That way, if students are browsing, and happen to choose a book someone else reviewed, they can scan the code and read the review right there, on the spot.
To broaden the scope of reviews, these students also reached out to language arts teachers at the start of the school year. If teachers decided to include reviewing as part of their class, Katie and Hannah wanted them to know that the reviews would have a place beyond the grade book.
Like a good essay, at the end of our conversation, Orloff and I circled back to the beginning. When I asked her what she hoped the blog would become, she told me that she would love to see every single book on the library shelves reviewed by multiple student voices. If that happened, not only would we have a relevant resource for students to use when they’re considering which books to read, but we would have an impressive visual of just how many pages have flown before the eyes of our kids, just how many stories have swept through their imagination, just how many voices have inspired them or informed their existence.
“I would love to see the library littered with bookmarks (tucked inside books, of course!),” Orloff told me, smiling, and just like I did when I imaged kids chattering about books the way they chatter about Netflix, I couldn’t help but smile too.
Click here to read entries from the UAHS book blog.
