Academic Reading Circles

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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. Traditionally in English classes, the whole class reads one literary work together. The students may complete several assignments around the text before completing a final essay or project as a capstone to the unit. Students read a wide range of print and nonprint texts to build an understanding of texts, of themselves, and of the cultures of the United States and the world; to acquire new information; to respond to the needs and demands of society and the workplace; and for personal fulfillment. Among these texts are fiction and nonfiction, classic and contemporary works.

Introduce the Literature Circle Roles to the class, and answer any questions that students have about these roles:I decided to include The Hate U Give, Dear Martin, and All American Boys. Together they offered a variety of protagonists, story lengths, and Lexile levels. Literature circles were first implemented in 1982 by Karen Smith, an elementary school teacher in Phoenix, Arizona. Handed a box of odd-and-end novels by a fellow teacher, Karen took them and promptly forgot about them. Later that year, some of her fifth grade students expressed an interest in reading them, organized themselves loosely into groups, and started to discuss the novels. Smith was surprised at the degree of their engagement with the books and the complexity of their discussions; they had no outside help or instruction from their teacher (Daniels, 1994). This role involves developing a list of questions that the group might discuss about the section of the novel to be discussed for that meeting. Questions should be designed to promote lively conversation and insights about the book; they should be open questions. A person with this task asks these questions of the group to prompt discussion; overall, the job is to keep the group talking and on-task. Questions that a student might ask could be: "What was going through your mind when you read this passage?" or "How did the main character change as a result of this incident?" The disadvantage is that you aren’t able to really dig into the nitty-gritty of each novel with the students that are reading it. Tightly Structured One less structured method could be to have all students working on the same assignments but responding with content from the novel they chose.

You're reading Circles at MangaForest. You can use the F11 button to read manga in full-screen(PC only). Anderson, P. & Corbett, L. (2008). Literature Circles for Students with Learning Disabilities. Intervention in School and Clinic, 44(1), 25-33.

You may want to provide students with a list of questions to answer or conversation starters. If your students are fairly independent, they may not need these; they might be able to jump into a discussion on their own!

Students participate as knowledgeable, reflective, creative, and critical members of a variety of literacy communities.

Session One

This will vary a lot depending on the length of your class, the length of the novels, and the outcome goals of the literature circles. To make sure the process runs smoothly, have group members arrange turn-taking by deciding who will go first, second, third, and so forth. Daniels, H. (2002). Literature Circles: Voice and Choice in Book Clubs and Reading Groups. Maine: Stenhouse Publishers.