Academic Reading Circles

Product Information

Have students get out copies of the Literary Luminary role sheet and review the information it contains.

First, you should know why you’re conducting literature circles. What skills or topics are you trying to teach? Knowing the end goal will help you select novels that will support your educational mission. We want to encourage students to come up with their own questions or goals for their discussions. One of literature circles’ greatest benefits is independent learning! Obviously, different students will read at different paces and groups with longer books may take more time to finish than groups with shorter books. Keep this in mind when planning group and whole class activities. Be very clear with your expectations for reading. How much will students need to do outside of class? How much time will they be given to read during class? I recommend giving them a calendar or list of deadlines with the expectations on it.Discussion director, whose job was to keep the group on task, help the group understand the reading, ask good detail questions as well as general questions, listen intently to the group members and respond to ideas, and make sure everyone participates.

While reading worksheets might be an effective way of making sure students read, they don’t mirror real life. When have you ever put down a great book in your adult life before immediately starting a book report on it? The following is a list of roles which give a thinking task to each group member. Students divide the tasks among themselves in each group. As the groups reconvene each session, students switch roles, so that by the end of the literature circles "unit," each student will have the opportunity to participate in each role. Again, the ideal is to eventually do away with the roles, although many teachers opt to continue using the roles to assist group on-task behaviour. One thing to keep in mind: Readers who are deeply engaged with a book and eager to talk about it with others may not need the structure of roles. Many teachers discover that the roles feel restrictive to some students and can become a disincentive to take part in literature circles. Harvey Daniels always intended roles to be a temporary scaffold to support students as they learn to talk about books in small groups. Remind students of the classroom dictionaries and other resources they can use as they serve in this role. Literature circles combine some of the most effective teaching strategies we know of for language development: independent reading, collaborative discussion, and student-centered learning. Lit Circles Encourage Choice Students conduct research on issues and interests by generating ideas and questions, and by posing problems. They gather, evaluate, and synthesize data from a variety of sources (e.g., print and nonprint texts, artifacts, people) to communicate their discoveries in ways that suit their purpose and audience.In a literature circles unit, however, there may be several groups of students with each group reading a different novel. These groups of students study, read, and work together to understand their text. If you want to give students choice, increase student independence, and reinforce a variety of skills and lifelong learning habits, then literature circles are the way to go! After the chapter has been read, have students re-read the questions on the Literary Luminary role sheet and make any revisions. To make sure the process runs smoothly, have group members arrange turn-taking by deciding who will go first, second, third, and so forth.

It may be helpful to have students choose from a series of books all by the same author, or for more senior students, give them more selection. For you type-A teachers, you could create assignments specific to each novel. For example, each student will have reading questions to answer specific to the novel that he or she is reading. Illustrator – after reading a specific passage to the group, the illustrator displays a visual image they have created which reflects what is read. They should then explain to the group why they chose to make certain inclusions and omissions and open the illustration up for group discussionConnector, who makes strong detailed connections cross-textually, historically, and culturally to the notion of what it means to be human and engages other group members in making similar connections.