Perhaps you’ve seen/heard the buzz on twitter (where, I’ve found, most awesome ideas begin with a 140 character spark). Perhaps a friend encouraged you to visit. Perhaps you’re just coming across this and think it sounds fun. No matter how you found us, we’d love for you to join in! (No twitter account or blog required-just an enthusiasm for reading with students!)

The purpose: To support, encourage, and celebrate reading and librarians and teachers. To network with other teachers and librarians on twitter to grow our PLNs. To enjoy a friendly challenge to keep us motivated to read as much as possible this summer. To hold ourselves accountable because we’ll have to tell someone how much we’re reading.

The timeframe: June 18 – July 17 ~ Majority of the book finished within these dates.
This means that if you start a book before the competition begins, that book still counts so long as you had less than half of the book finished before June 18th. If you start a book during the timeframe but don’t finish it before July 17th, it doesn’t count, no matter how much you have finished. So, no waiting to finish the last pages of a book until the 18th (nice try, though!), but go ahead and get started on one, it’ll still count. We don’t want to interrupt anyone’s reading flow/pace here. (Hey, we’re middle school teachers, we’re trained to think in ways students would to get around rules.)

The guidelines: Every book you read counts as a book read!
We all have different specialties and are reading books to prepare us to teach/work with different levels of students. All of this reading is valuable. If you’re reading picture books to prepare to teach Pre-K (or for use with any level students for that matter), that’s as important as someone reading 400+ page tomes to prepare to teach AP English. Or if you just like that sort of thing. ALL READING IS VALUABLE. But because we ought to find some way to keep this on a level playing field, there are some handicaps in place for the scoring
          ~Any format of books read counts for this (novel, picture book, graphic novel, etc.)
          ~Any way you read counts (by yourself, audiobook, reading to a child, etc.)
          ~Books under 50 pages count as 1/4
          ~Books between 50-150 pages count as 1/2
          ~Books over 150 pages count as 1

The main rule-KIPP: Keep It Positive, Please! This is all in the mode of encouraging reading and we want to be positive role models for our students. All-in-fun trash-talking is fine (and, essentially encouraged if Brian & I are any example), but please keep it in the spirit of the purpose of this reading event! Thanks so much!

The winner(s): EVERYONE because we’re all going to be reading more (we hope) and growing our community/network of teachers and librarians on twitter and beyond. But the group (Librarians or Teachers) that reads more, determined by a collective total figured into books/person, does get the bragging rights.

The people behind the curtain: Brian (@brianwyzlic) and I (@heisereads) [teachers] first started the friendly #teacherthrowdown and Kathy (@thebrainlair) and Sherry (@LibraryFanatic) [librarians] ran with a summer version teachers vs. librarians idea. If you have any questions, feel free to ask any of us (you can easily find us all on twitter)!

The history: aka: So what is this #throwdown thing anyway? Brian and I started this as an offshoot from a reading motivator #throwdown we did with our Sister Classroom Project this year. If you want to know more about it, I explained it here and Brian talked about it here.

The links:
Get started here…Join the #summerthrowdown challenge!

Record your progress…on this spreadsheet.

The buttons: Copy a button to your blog/twitter/electronic method of choice to show your affiliation and declare it on twitter:

 We keep getting questions on twitter, so decided to clear it all up in more than 140 characters! (Brian and I are both posting our own #throwdown explanations today-the link to his is at the bottom.)

So, maybe you’ve seen the #throwdown2 or #teacherthrowdown hashtags lately on twitter. Likely between Brian Wyzlic (@brianwyzlic) and myself (@heisereads). We’ve been doing a sister classroom project experiment all year (extensive blog post to come in June), and this idea came about from a somewhat taunting tweet from Brian (it shouldn’t be shocking that Brian is sending me taunting tweets):


Obviously, I couldn’t ignore that or let my students back down, so I accepted the challenge and we started in on a journey to motivating readers that exceeded my expectations!

Our first #throwdown battle was for the month of March. Brian, being the math teacher, recommended that we not only tally the total books, but base the winner on a books/student ratio to make it fair and accomodate the difference in class sizes. One basic rule was that graphic novels (since my students were required to read one that month) equaled half a book. We updated often via twitter with the #throwdown hashtag, and there was quite a bit of taunting and trash-talking going on throughout, which only seemed to motivate my students even more. It ended up that my class beat Brian’s with these results:

But both classes read a lot of books! Our prize sent from Michigan was some delicious Macinac Island fudge.

After all of the excitement of March, I was feeling a little bit unmotivated in April and wanted to think of something to do to help motivate my students after spring break, so I sent this out to my fearless sister classroom:

Luckily, since we were feeling a little unimaginative, he agreed to another round (plus, I did think we should at least give his group the chance to win one). Due to Mr. Wyzlic’s homeroom being 8th grade and them getting out of school earlier than my 7th graders, and wanting to make sure that there was time to send the prize should they win this round, we had to back it up a little bit and start our second throwdown on April 24th so we could get a whole month in, with an in-class reveal of the winner via Skype on Friday, May 25th.

Then came time to name it. I suggested #throwdownredux but Brian wasn’t having it because as he reminded me-we only have 140 characters. So #throwdown2 was started (which is probably good because coming up with terms for future numbers could have become problematic).
Of course, we then had to set some basic expectations which were:
1. Any book they finished after April 24th counted (even if they started it before). They have until midnight of the last day to finish and count a book.
2. Whole class books (which both of us were doing in that month) counted for each student once finished.
3. Ratios: 4 graphic novels count as 1 book; 2 free verse novels count as 1 book. Fractions are allowed.
4. In order to count, chosen books need to be appropriate for students’ skill level – they can’t just choose really easy books to inflate their counts.

My students were excited to do another round, but Brian’s students were really motivated to kick our butts this time to redeem themselves from their March loss. However, there was still one issue to be worked out. During the first round, my students had asked if the books Mr. Wyzlic and I were reading counted toward the class totals. At the time, we didn’t include them because we were partway through, but it was an interesting question and only seemed fair that we do what we were asking our students to do. So, for #throwdown2, Brian and I agreed that we would battle each other also, and a second #teacherthrowdown began. (The first #teacherthrowdown was related to our March Book Madness brackets and Brian and I both filled out a prediction bracket – the winner by far was Brian.)

Overall, our totals for #throwdown2 were improved over the first #throwdown. Mr. Wyzlic’s class ended up beating mine with 144 books read for 6 books/student. However, we both consider that we are benefitting because each of our classes read over 100 books again (and increased over the last round), and Brian and I read a combined total of 18 books in only 30 days (oh, and I won that one!). And since I’m sure you’re wondering, the prize we’re sending them for winning is an tasty Wisconsin treat (but I can’t tell you more than that yet because they don’t know what it will be!)

It’s pretty awesome! I have not seen anything else serve to motivate my students as much as this all-in-good-fun battling of books and earning the bragging rights and sense of accomplishement. And, that my friends, is the heart of #throwdown and why we will definitely be doing more of them next year. We also already have plans for a summer version of #teacherthrowdown (to be revealed at a later date).

#throwdown has been a blast this year and I can’t wait to do more next year! Are you ready for your own #throwdown now? If so, let us know about it! I’d love to see more people joining in with their own versions of #throwdown challenges!

Don’t forget to check out Brian’s take on this whole #throwdown thing on his blog at WyzReads.