EPASA Book Club

EdP Mini-Grants in action

In the spring of 2014, Stanford students participating in the Haas Center's East Palo Alto Stanford Academy (EPASA) mentoring program applied for an EdP Mini-Grant for their idea to run a book club for their middle school students. Jackson Beard, Alemar Brito, Stephanie Bieler, J Evans, and Lacey Wickersham (lead) planned and executed the project under the direction of Education and Youth Development fellow Sophie Shank. To follow is Lacey's project report.

Education Partnerships Mini-Grant
Spring 2014
Project Summary
EPASA Book Club

Speaking for myself and the other tutors who participated in making the Spring EPASA book club run smoothly, I can say that we were very pleased to see our project in action benefiting the EPASA community. We had students read four chapters a week in either Christopher Paul Curtis’s Bud Not Buddy or Lois Lowry’s The Giver. Then at each EPASA session we split students into small groups for the first fifteen minutes of tutoring hour to reflect and discuss the books.

Even though our book club worked very well, there are a couple of improvements that could be made in future years if this project were to be done again. The most obvious improvement that could be made was that there was never enough time to talk about everything we had read! This isn’t a terrible problem, except that I always felt bad when students wanted to make more comments, but our book club time was up. I think the best thing to do about this would be to read less per week, and maybe do the book club for two quarters – the alternative of course would be to allot more time for the discussions, but it would be at the sacrifice of already limited tutoring time which, of course, is not ideal. A second improvement might be keeping the small groups (four students) more medium sized (five to six students). This would help make absences less noticeable, and increase the chances of building new relationships.

It was really great to see students and tutors excited about reading together. At first we thought we might need incentives to encourage the students (and tutors) to stay on the reading schedule, but we decided to wait and see how everyone did without this. We found that most of the students were just as excited to be reading the books as the tutors were. In my particular group (we read The Giver), there was one student who missed the second session. I had been worried that he would be behind, but when he returned to the third session he had almost finished the book. He was excited about reading, and excited to discuss the book to the point I had to remind him not to spoil it! This is only one of several examples where our project exceeded our expectations, and worked better than we could have planned for.

Moreover, the team of tutors responsible for this EPASA book club would like to thank the Haas Center for providing us with the opportunity and means to collaborate on a project to benefit the EPASA community, without which this may not have been possible!

Proposed Budget: $370.98
Actual Total Expenses: $227.45