Academic Reading Circles

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The amount of structure will inevitably affect the type of assignments students complete. Loosely Structured

Burda, K. (2000). "Living and learning: A four-year journey into literature circles". Primary Voices K-6. 9 (1): 17–22. But if you’re using a literature circle to teach a genre, your novel choices should all be from that genre. For example, if you’re teaching a dystopian unit using lit circles, you’ll obviously choose books from the dystopian genre.Remind students of the classroom dictionaries and other resources they can use as they serve in this role. Demonstrate how the Vocabulary Enricher would use the Vocabulary Enricher role sheet to participate in the discussion.

The above are simply those recommended in the literature as essential, but educators can use this as a guide and can add, remove, or divide roles according to their classroom needs. 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. Explain that during this session, you will act as the Vocabulary Enricher to demonstrate how to do the task.One of the great features of literature circles is that they mirror the way readers actually interact with the texts that they read.

Repeat this process until everyone in the class has had a chance to practice the Discussion Director role. If you’re planning a unit that will take a whole quarter (nine weeks of instruction time), aim for about five weeks of reading. This will give you one week to introduce the literature circles and for students to choose their novels and two weeks to wrap up the unit and complete final assessments. Daniels, H. (1994). Literature Circles: Voice and Choice in the Student-Centered Classroom. Markham: Pembroke Publishers Ltd. There’s an excitement around sharing words,” says Harvard Graduate School of Education senior lecturer and Jeanne Chall Reading Lab director Pamela Mason, whose work and research focuses on developing culturally responsive and effective literacy and reading instructional practices. “Children have a right to those experiences, and they want those types of experiences. That’s what makes learning fun and engages them in school.”If students are reading full novels independently, I think you will probably need at least a full nine-week quarter for this. Especially if you are teaching other skills or concepts during the unit. There are, of course, many more roles that you could create. (A fun option to add might be an Illustrator, who creates sketch notes of the group’s discussion!) Use your best judgment. I always recommend leaving a “buffer week” for any unit planning. If you do this, you should be able to adjust a little as you go. But there are some key differences. Literature circles tend to be more structured with a focus on an academic outcome than book clubs.