We see a huge increase in student engagement when we use Great Books materials and the Shared Inquiry method. Just the level of excitement that kids get about being able to be invited into a text and have their own ideas be safe and acceptable in a large group is really meaningful and gives them ownership, and therefore, student engagement increases.

Junior Great Books provides multiple entry points for kids to show what they know through discourse. It is an equity piece in our curriculum, because the kids really feel as though . . . they have something to offer in a very safe environment. I see Great Books as a huge equalizer to have students of all abilities understand that their ideas are valued.

My experiences with using the JGB curriculum have been nothing less than amazing! I have observed the growth of my students in every grade level where I’ve used the curriculum.

Lower-ability readers worked collaboratively with high-level readers. The high-level readers gained oral skills and became more comfortable speaking in class. The lower-level readers gained confidence and deeper thinking skills. Each group grew in their thinking, writing, and reading skills. Best, they learned social and interactive skills.

Junior Great Books teaches me how to talk to someone. It helps me think about how other people are dealing with stuff and how I could be a better person to help them get through that stuff.

In today’s world, what most companies or jobs are looking for is the ability to collaborate well, and I think the best collaborators are those that know how to listen to others, to take different points of view, and then take on a leadership role . . . That is a skill that is just going to be beyond helpful to students, and the fact that they are getting to practice it now, in a safe place through fun stories, is the greatest.

The Shared Inquiry strategies and the way we interact with a text can be used with any genre. We use it with poetry, we use it with nonfiction, we use it in preparation for our state testing.

For students that are age 5 or 13 right now, we don’t know what the world is going to look like when they’re 25. I think Shared Inquiry then is a really powerful way to help kids learn how to think, how to analyze, ask and answer questions, the kind of skill set that in 20 years [will] be very helpful in every aspect of your life.

The students have gained confidence in sharing their ideas with explanations. They also communicate respectfully and have come to understand that different ideas and opinions are acceptable!

[Students’] critical and analytical thinking skills have greatly improved over the course of the year as we are working through these stories. The fact that my students are able to come up with mul-tiple answers to the same question and defend them is one of the other areas where I have seen the habits of Shared Inquiry carry over into other things that we do. Students are able to cite text evidence to support their responses on a much greater and deeper level than they had been before, and I attribute that to what we are doing with them with the Junior Great Books conversations.