A couple of years of the Class Read: what I've learned

[Admission: I actually wrote this a year ago and never got around to posting it.]

A few years ago I wrote about an experiment I was just starting: getting a whole class to read the same non-fiction book together, a "Class Read". You can find that original post here, and it lays out where I started and why. I'm pleased to say the experiment stuck. This is also one of my Classroom Systems; you can take a look at the others here. I've packaged up everything, all the resources that I made to go with this book, which you can see in the shop here, but you can read at the bottom of the page how to run this without a formal programme.

Why bother with a class read at all?

For anyone who hasn't read the original post, here's the quick version of what I was afte:

I wanted to build students' reading stamina and get them more comfortable with non-fiction, because not every student arrives having read a whole non-fiction book cover to cover (it's also something everyone can then pop on a personal statement). I wanted to broaden their vocabulary, particularly tier-two words, and I wanted to broaden their general/contextual knowledge.

Those were the aims I went in with and I think they were largely met. However, some of the key benefits were things I hadn't really anticipated.

The big one, and the thing I'd most underestimated, was the value of a shared canon of reference points. I was teaching a class with pretty varied backgrounds: some students who'd only been in the country a few months, some from military families who'd always lived abroad, some from agricultural families. Their points of reference were often very different, and having a common set of examples we all knew turned out to be really useful to refer back to across the A-Level.

The next big one is background knowledge of economics before we teach it properly. The book covers a lot of ground that's close to the spec but comes at it from a slightly broader angle, and I've found it's a really nice introduction to things, especially some of the macro. One of the perennial headaches with macro is that so many of the topics lean on each other, so students sort of need to know about one thing before they can properly get the next, and it's tricky to know where to start. Having read the book gives them a foundation to build on, and a more general awareness of economics and economic theory to hang the formal content off.

It also builds up a bit of the history of economic thought, which doesn't always happen naturally within the spec. There's loads in there about different economists and how ideas have changed over time, and I think that gives students a really valuable picture: economics isn't one finished, true set of facts, it's evolving all the time. People criticise it, then we learn new things. I hope that knowledge could make students more critical and think more like an economist, rather than assuming all the theory is just true.

Then there's contextual knowledge: historical examples, current examples, and a fair bit of general knowledge that's just handy to have (eg Where is Calcutta?). And, slightly to my surprise, it exposes students to a load of very millennial cultural references: knowing who Del Boy is, or a particular episode of the Simpsons. All vital information, obviously.

Why this book?

In the original post I explained why I went for Can't We Just Print More Money? by Rupal Patel and Jack Meaning, and I still think it's a good shout. The level of economic knowledge needed is pretty small, and the vocabulary was at just the right level so that it was able to push students without being inaccessible. It's also not so close to the spec that they gain nothing extra, but not so far that it's hard to relate back to their learning.

The one thing it doesn't have (though it still does this better than a lot of economics books) is a really strong narrative. A story can carry weaker readers along, and this doesn't quite have that. Extreme Economies is probably better on narrative, but the language is a bit harder, so even though students would be fine once they were into it, it's a tougher read overall. So I'm still happy with Can't We Just Print More Money?

How I run it

The first year, I split the reading into lots of little sections. Each week students did some exercises on the vocab from that section, then read it, then answered some questions, all in one go. Below is an example of the kind of questions I gave them:

The trouble was that with sections sometimes only five pages long, there were so many of them that the whole thing felt fragmented, and it broke the rhythm of the reading.

So I then switched to working a chapter at a time, on a three-week cycle:

• Week one: look over vocab and references. 

• Week two: read the chapter.

• Week three: answer the questions. Then we loop back round and do all three again.

I do think it was useful to pre-give students the opportunity to pre-learn any of that tricky vocab, particularly for my EAL students. As I noted in the original blog post, I was amazed by how much complicated language you can find in any chapter when you start looking for it!  I split this up into:

• Technical vocabulary that was a bit more economics-specific

• Other useful vocabulary, which tended to be more like the tier 2 vocabulary

• Idioms that we used in the text

• Any colloquial or cultural references for students who don't necessarily know what a Nokia 3310 was

 I gave students the sheet of tricky words and references for that chapter, and they go through it highlighting and learning anything they don't already know. It's a quick way for them to spot and target the words they're not happy with.

For the first few chapters, I actually tested the vocab in Week 1. I didn't want it to eat time for students who already knew the words, but I did want to give the ones who didn't a reason to actually learn them, so I made it multiple choice, but rather than testing 65 words one by one, each question shows four word-and-definition pairs with one of them altered, and students just have to spot the incorrect pairing. It's quick if you already know the words, and a 10-question quiz gets you through around 40 words and phrases. I did eventually drop the quiz, because my lot were all getting 100%, but with a different group I'd happily keep it in my back pocket. I made these using a custom GPT which I've linked here. It gives the answers in Aiken format, which means that you can paste it into a Word document and upload it straight into Forms, and the correct answers will be already inputted for you, so it's super quick. if that sounds a bit complicated, I assure you it's much more simple in practice! I go into more detail about custom GPTs and Aiken format here.

How the system changed over time

I've run through a few iterations to get here, and a few changes are worth flagging. Firstly, I dropped some of the richer vocab activities, the ones in the Introduction booklet that really made students think about the words. I was sad to lose them, but doing that every chapter became unwieldy and ate into student time. Having the vocab on a sheet so they just learn the ones they don't know is a much better time trade-off: students who already understand spend almost no time on it, and it's all there in one place for students who need it.

Secondly, we used to do a discussion question at the end of each chapter and talk it through in class, but we were just running out of time, so that went too.

One year I ran the questions through Microsoft Forms, which is easy enough to set up (just upload the relevant PDF pages), and that worked ok. The slightly fiddly part is checking they've updated their other logs. That said, you don't need Forms at all: it's just as quick to get students to hold up their booklets, pass them to the person next to them, and go through the answers on the paper version.

Zooming in and zooming out

The bit I particularly like is that the guide works at two zoom levels. The chapter questions zoom in on the detail of each chapter and pull out the key ideas. But there are also logs that zoom out:

• a log of economists (and other key thinkers), so students might learn something about Keynes in chapter two, add to it in chapter five, and slowly build a bigger picture of how economic thought has changed over time;

• a world map to collate the geographical references and really capitalise on that sense of place;

• a timeline for putting events and ideas in order.

This could even be done as a class, updating a big map or timeline each week.

You don't actually need a programme

You can absolutely do a class read with any book without any programme at all. For "Can't We Just Print More Money", you have a couple of alternatives to my more structured reading programme. You could just get students to answer each of the ten big questions the book tackles, or work through the smaller questions in the index at the back and write up answers to those. There's also a companion that was published alongside the book and sent to state schools, which you might be able to get your hands on.

I just wanted something a bit more structured, with a bit more help emphasis on the vocab-front. The final programme sits at what felt to me like a really good sweet spot: students do have to spend a bit longer on it to answer the more detailed chapter questions, but in return we get a lot more out of the book. It kept things at arm's length for me as the teacher while still being easy to manage and mark.

A few practical bits

Getting a class set of books isn't always the easiest thing to arrange, I know, but mine have lasted really well. Two things made the difference: I got them with the covers on, and I made absolutely sure students wrote their names inside them. I numbered them too and kept track of who had which, so when I found a stray copy abandoned in the sixth form centre I could work out whose it was.

Photocopying is the other challenge. I was lucky enough to be able to print the whole booklet, which worked really well, but there's also a lower-print version if you'd rather print it once and use it as a reference.

I ran it week by week across the year, but you don't have to. Some teachers might fancy setting it over the summer (it's a lot of reading, but actually quite a nice summer project), and others might just use the chapter summaries rather than the whole thing. You can find my full reading programme, with all the documents I printed and used, here.