I Recommend...

We talk all of the time about student voice and choice. We aim to hand over the decision-making responsibility to our students as they go through our school system. We coach them in what makes a good decision, ramifications of those decisions, and then we let them begin making more and more decisions. One of the things I love to see is when kids start making decisions about their learning. There are so many ways we can incorporate student decision-making into the everyday lives of kids at school. I see teachers everyday giving kids opportunities to choose learning experiences, collaborative teams, and ways to meet their curricular standards. 

In the media center, we also want to give kids a voice in their learning. One of the ways we have decided to give students voice is to have our kiddos make book recommendations. As adults, we make book recommendations to kids all of the time. However, a lot of times the books we recommend do not resonate with our kids because we read them from our perspective as adults, not as kids would read them. We mean well, but we often miss the mark. There are also times that kids will reject recommendations from adults because they consider them "teacher books" and not books that they would want to read.

We started incorporating student recommendations this year by creating a gallery in the media center windows. When students pass by, they see pictures of our kids with a book that they recommend in their hands. Kids can identify their schoolmates and see what books they love. They may be more inclined to pick up those books if they know that their friends have read them. One of the most powerful ways to get kids reading is to have peers recommend books. It helps build a culture of reading when we all talk about our reading, and over time, kids learn to be proud of all of the books they have read and their future reading goals. Our student book recommendations are a hit. We knew they would be. Our kids are using their voices to celebrate their reading. We could not be happier about it.