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

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
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 RememberYou 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.
- The Book Pass Handout: teachers can build their list!
- Starting Reader’s & Writer’s Workshop
- Building Community
- Science
- Math
- Social Studies
- Diversity
- Narrative Mentor Texts for Writing
- Expository Mentor Texts for Writing
- Fiction Picture Books for Teaching Strategies
- Fiction Picture Books for Teaching Skills
- Nonfiction Picture Books for Teaching Strategies
- Nonfiction Picture Books for Teaching Skills
Hi Chrissy,
I see a video on this post, but the link just goes to a picture of the video. Can you send me a link, please? 🙂
Thanks for sharing this awesome idea! I'm thinking we'll give it a try at our next literacy PD session.
-Michelle TG
Wow! Sorry about that! I'm not sure what's going on with that video! You're not missing much – it was just a short video of a table set up with book baskets for the book pass. I hope it works out well for you!
Thank you! Chrissy
Where is the link to download? It sounds like an amazing resource.
Thanks for your interest! The link is right at the bottom of the page where it says "Picture Books for Campus PD Providers". You fill in your email address and name and the download is sent to your inbox!