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Friday, January 5, 2018

Let's Get Ready to Mock!

We here at Guessing Geisel are excited to announce we’ll once again be hosting a Guessing Geisel Mock Vote here on the blog.

 
There are many ways to host a Mock Award. Some take place in schools or public libraries, with young readers, or with colleagues serving as professional development opportunities. All have varying levels of similarity to the committee experience, and many adhere to the criteria to the degree that they can.

 
The actual Geisel Committee will have two full days to discuss and deliberate face to face in February, and will have spent the previous year reading, rereading, reviewing and assessing, observing beginning readers, and preparing their suggestions and nominations.

 
For most Mock Awards, participants may not have read all of the titles under consideration. If they are able to gather in person, it is often for no more than an hour or two, or their discussions may be spread out over the course of many weeks or months. If they are not able to gather in person, that component of face to face discussion is missed entirely.

 
However, we see lots of reasons to host a Mock Award. We find the more closely we can examine the criteria and mimic the balloting process, the more insight we have into the process. We come to see how only one honor book might be awarded in a given year, or how six honors might be chosen. We see how it could take multiple ballots to determine a winner, or how it might be settled after the first one. Only seven people in the entire country will actually know what happened in the room in any given year, and they will never tell. But by mimicking the experience, we develop a keener sense of how things might develop behind those closed doors.

 
Not to mention, it’s fun!

 
Sample Ballot from the Geisel Manual

Our Guessing Geisel Mock Vote will be conducted as follows:
  1. At the bottom of this post is a list of titles, to which we invite you to add your suggestions and nominations. Comment and tell us what excellent contenders are missing from our list. Or, make an argument for your favorites already included.
  2. A first ballot will be live from January 18th-24th. To mimic the voting process of the actual committee, you will have room on your ballot for three titles. A first place vote will be worth 4 points, a second place vote 3 points, and a third place vote will be worth 2 points. It's not required that you have read all books to participate, although we recommend reading as many as possible and reading reviews here and elsewhere. We are open to the possibility that we, just like the real committee, may have a clear winner after a first ballot, in which case we'll stop there and announce our results.
  3. If the first ballot does not produce a clear winner, we’ll conduct a second ballot from January 25th-February 1st. The real committee would keep going until they met the criteria for determining a winner, but we will stop after our second ballot and determine our winners. We invite you to join us for this virtual Mock Geisel with the hope that you’ll discover some new favorites for beginning readers.

 
2018 Mock Geisel Contenders
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