💬 “How do I get this student to join the conversation?”

💬 “How do I get this student to join the conversation?”

That’s what Ella van Zyl shared with me during my visit to Green School South Africa — a question she’d been wrestling with.

She’s one of those teachers who lives for deep reading.
Real discussions. Passionate debates.
And her students thrive in it — I’ve seen it firsthand.

But not this one student.

He wouldn’t engage. Wouldn’t join the class conversation around the book.

So we flipped the question.

It’s not:
Why won’t he engage in the class conversation?
It’s:
Has he found a book worth discussing at all?

Because before we talk about finding your voice,
before we talk about group dynamics or classroom culture —
we need to talk about spark.

🔥 The hard truth:

There is no book everyone loves.

Force every student to read the same novel?
You lose someone at page one.

Let everyone pick their own?
You lose the shared conversation.

So what do we do?

Ella and I mapped out two simple but powerful starting points:

📘 → Shared Anchor, Personal Stretch
Everyone reads a central book — that’s the anchor.
But students who need a different spark?
They stretch sideways with a book they choose.
Fiction, nonfiction, comics, memoirs — whatever lights the fuse.
At the end, they bring their passion
into a reflective group conversation.

They don’t just catch up — they add something new.

📚 → Democratic Book Clusters
Students pitch books.
They rally around 3–4 that get real “yes, I want to read this” energy.
Small groups form.
Micro-communities built on shared interest.

And later — they return to the big circle,
not with summaries…
but perspectives.

💡 Here’s what we realized:

You can’t force someone to care.

But you can help them discover
what it feels like to care.

🧩 That’s how we build:

✔️ Self-Development from the inside out
✔️ Freedom to Experiment & Research
✔️ Respectfully Unequal learning journeys

Not every learner starts on the same page.
But every learner deserves the chance
to write their own chapter.

🌍 Shoutout to the Green School SA team for creating the space
where conversations like this can happen.

🚀 Let’s keep building.