The Power of Social Media to Engage Teen Readers at Berkeley High

This week’s blog post is by guest blogger Mary Ann Scheuer, BUSD Teacher-Librarian.

It’s no secret that many teens love social media. They want to know what their friends are doing, liking and sharing. At Berkeley High, we’ve been using Goodreads & Pinterest to engage our readers, encouraging them to find more books to read. Goodreads is a social media site for readers, letting you mark books you’ve read or want to read, add reviews and share them with friends.

BHS Library on Goodreads

While reading might be something you do alone in your own head, its true power comes from sharing the experience. What do our friends think of this? Have they read it, or does it remind them of something like it? If I liked this book, is there another one that I might like reading?

Key to this process is valuing all of the books our students are reading. The masterful teacher Donalyn Miller writes passionately about how we must value and encourage our students’ choices in what they read.

Using Goodreads has let us honor and value our students’ reading choices, whether they love horror graphic novels like Tokyo Ghoul, powerful nonfiction like The 57 Bus or contemporary YA like Libba Bray’s The Diviners. Each reader is different, with different tastes, preferences and interests. I have loved the conversations that come from learning more about what they like.

Yesterday, I was talking with a freshman who liked reading Nightfall, by Jake Halpern–an intense action-adventure story that kept him up all night reading. When I read his review, it made me think of how much I had liked reading Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet. So I built a Pinterest board focusing on wilderness adventures. My student said to me, “Wait, you created this just because I liked Nightfall? Just for me?” It was a powerful moment–and he left the library with a new book to read: Trapped, by Michael Northrop.

Berkeley High Library’s Pinterest page:
Survival & Wilderness Adventures @ BHS Library

The true power of using social media to engage teen readers is that it lets our students develop their own authentic voices. I have loved working with fellow Berkeley High librarian Meredith Irby to focus on how we can encourage teens to write authentically about their reading experiences. I so appreciate how thoughtful she is, helping teens develop their writing styles. This type of writing is actually a lot like the personal essays teens will write for college applications. As Donalyn Miller writes in Reading in the Wild:

“If we really want our students to become wild readers, independent of our support and oversight, sometimes the best thing we can do is get out of the way.”

Follow Berkeley High Library on Goodreads & Pinterest to see what our teens are reading and what we love sharing with them.