The Book Pass: Exploring Books During Professional Development *Free download

Recently, I shared a post about six must-use strategies for professional development. One of them was a Book Pass, and it got a lot of questions!  

To help you use this awesome strategy in your next PD, I put together a free download! It includes the Book Pass recording sheets plus lists of books for so many topics!

You can use these lists to build your book baskets and get teachers excited about using books in their teaching!

Read on to learn about how to use a Book Pass during your next training, workshop, or professional development inservice, no matter what the topic is! Get your teachers engaged and thinking about books!

Why should I use a Book Pass?
Book passes are valuable, regardless of the content you are teaching. This is because all teachers are teachers of literacy.
Yes, even the math teacher who says they don’t like to read. Guess what? The majority of math errors are actually reading errors that result from poor comprehension of math problems. So yes, even you, Ms. IDon’tLikeToRead is a teacher of reading.

In addition to this, we have to find different ways of reaching our students. For many students, their listening comprehension exceeds their reading comprehension. So, if we can engage them in a read aloud about the topic we are learning, we can access the part of their brain that learns by listening.

The tricky part is, sometimes teachers are struggling to find the time to dig through their resources and figure out what books could be used for teaching their content. If we can give them the time to do this during professional development, they’ll be set and you’ve helped them overcome one hurdle to using a best practice.

So that’s why you want to use a Book Pass. But how do you do it?

Build Your Baskets

To use a Book Pass, first identify the topic of your professional development session. This will determine the kind of books you add to your baskets.

 

For example, if you are facilitating a workshop about hands-on math strategies, you’ll want to find a collection of books that involves that topic. These could include…

Place Value by David Adler

A Remainder of One by Elinor J. Pinczes

or Math Potatoes by Greg Tang

If you only have a very limited amount of time, I recommend providing one book per person in your basket. So, if you have a table of five people, put five books in the basket. Place the basket in the middle of their table. Each person gets one book which they will browse and share about with their team.

If you have a good amount of time, you can put 2-3 books for each person at the table into the basket So, if you have a table of about 5 people, you can put 10-15 books in the basket so people can choose the book that appeals to them and browse through it, and then possibly have time to choose another.

How to Manage a Book Pass
As with all PD activities, you need to set a clear purpose for what people are doing. Do this in a few ways:

• Introduce the idea that every teacher can use picture books in their teaching for different purposes (read aloud to build background knowledge, reinforce concepts, build vocabulary, create engagement in a new topic for learning, mentor texts for reading and writing strategies, etc.)
• Explain that teachers will have access to a basket of books related to the topic of the workshop. Tell them how much time they will have to browse through the books.
• Show what to look for: ideas for minilessons, namely. You can do this by reading or scanning the book. You can model this if you need to.
• Provide the recording sheet and explain that, by the end of the activity, they will need to have added any books they’d like to use to their list.
• If you have time for it, set the expectation that each person will share one book from the basket with their group so their colleagues can add the book to their list if they’d like.

Important Ideas to Remember
You want these books to be accessible to teachers. Books they have in their classroom libraries, the school library, or that you have available to loan out are ideal because they are already on campus.

If you do not have access to the books you need on campus, get them from the public library. The BEST TOOL EVER is the public library “hold” feature on their website. I don’t know if everyone can do this everywhere, but I go to the website for my local library and put books on “hold” that I want to use.
 

I search for the books I want, and if they’re not available at my library, they will transfer them over. Then I get a notice when the books are ready to be picked up, and I stop by and pick up my stack. It takes five minutes to pop in and out. It’s amazing and free.
 

If you notice teacher aren’t using the time you provide, you will need to step in. Just pop over to the table and ask, “Have you found a book you’d like to use in class?” If they say yes, ask about it. If they say no, pull one of the books out of the basket and introduce it to them. Ask them to take a look at it and tell you what they think.
 

Time to look at books is too precious to waste. They may have questions about how to use books in their content or subject area. Spend the time you need to help the teacher make the change in their thinking, right then and there. Or offer to model/coteach and set up a date! Then you can choose a book together!

Want to get started with a free download? Yes! You totally should! This freebie includes the recording sheets, plus so many lists of books to help you prepare for your book pass activity (or to recommend mentor texts to teachers)! In this free download…