Good book, bad book

I spent some time in a charter school in Los Angeles last week. While I was there, I observed a talented young teacher struggling to engage a class of 10th graders who weren't excited about the novel they were reading. The book was Bless Me, Ultima - a great book, to be sure, but one that about half of the students plainly did not like or find particularly engaging. After class, I met with the teacher to talk about strategies for engaging the students. We talked about some different tactics, but one that we decided to try was an exercise called "Good Book, Bad Book." The idea is to have students make an argument about the book using the ARE method (discussed here last week, encouraging them to reflect on their impressions of the book so far from a "bigger picture" perspective. It's a simple exercise, but one works to engage students in discussion and debate about the merit of a particular text. I've uploaded the instructions and worksheet here as a Word document. Now, this may seem like a dangerous strategy- but it's not as if you're putting the book up for a vote; rather, you're trying to get students to reflect on the characteristics of a good or bad book, and to have an informed opinion (For example, if a student thinks the book is boring, they have to produce evidence from the text to support their opinion). I like this little exercise- it can be repeated periodically through a novel, and is a way to scaffold a book review assignment or other critical reading exercise where students use these worksheets as a way to develop criteria for analysis of texts. It's also an example of how you can integrate argumentation into the reading of literature, if only in a small way.