This afternoon I was scrolling through my RSS reader, and one feed caught my eye: Are we doing anything today?

Every year my students read All Quiet on the Western Front. I force them through the process of a Quaker Read then into developing a poem from lines culled from the chapter. It takes a couple of days of work, but looking at the poems and listening to their comments makes the effort worthwhile.

A Quaker Read?

Perhaps I’ve been out of the classroom too long, but I had no idea what a Quaker Read is.

From a webpage at Seattle University, Reading Response and Discussion Strategies, we learn,

Quaker Read
Readers fist select a significant passage, line, or phrase from the reading. Then, seated in a circle giving no explanation or rationale, one student reads his/her selection aloud. In no particular order, another reader adds his/her selection, and on and on. The key is to listen and consider how your selected passage connects to (or even contrasts with) the passage read. Remind students that lulls, pauses, and repeated passages are fine.

Oh, it has a name…