Initially, when I was hired at AMS, my goal was to implement my own nascent literacy program and to steer educators away from the Harvey Daniels’s version of Literature Circles. As it happens, with many teachers Literature Circles seem to be like that one band everyone’s always talking about that leaves you saying: I know of their music, but have never actually heard it.” There seems to be some confusion as to what Literature Circles are, so let me proffer a helpful visual:
Just as I cannot place a sticker on my desk that says “Literature Circles” and expect that others will treat it as such, handouts that proclaim “Literature Circles” (downloaded from online sources where Literature Circles are espoused) might only be true for those that know how to implement them in the classroom. But, wait—I haven’t even given a definition proper as to what Literature Circles are, so here is yet another useful screenshot:
Here is where we should begin speaking to the concept of “teacher-proofing” literacy strategies; this is a bit of a hot topic as on the one hand, literacy experts can ensure that, one, they are able to parlay a program into a paid ecosystem that schools can purchase. [Many of these programs declare that “according to the research,” theirs is the program to beat as “clinical and action research” has shown that, if the script is followed, no teacher in the world can make a mess of it (Success for All immediately springs to mind). In other words, “pre(-)scripted” (in both senses, there is in some cases literally a script to follow and it is advocated by some experts). The problem with this is that these programs aren’t meant for real-world classrooms because in the real world class sizes range from 18-35 students and many of these programs’ studies show that achievement gains decline as class size increases.] On the other hand, however, by using or implying that “teacher-proofing” a program is a necessary component in a program’s success, we are also saying that teachers shouldn’t have the freedom to make choices within or changes to that program as their own experience and efficacy is not taken into consideration.
As a counter-point to this counterpoint, though, do most teachers have the necessary literacy expertise to truly know what they are doing when they conduct a workshop on revision, or try to implement the latest and greatest assessment strategies simply because everyone else is talking about it? Do most teachers understand how to interpret, say, the parts of a clinical study, do they know what the significance of the n value is, or even how to determine whether a study’s findings are analogous to the make-up of their students’ ability levels? If everything in education is to be run by “best practice methods that are research-based,” then what does it really mean when someone can’t understand how to read a quantitative/qualitative study?
This is usually why most districts hire personnel like technology specialists, speech specialists, and reading specialists--they're credentialed and/or licensed to know what they're doing. But this is only one variable in this précis of what Literature Circles really are as a collective whole. In Screenshot A, the items I have circled in red address several pressing issues that I have concerning the textbook presentation of Harvey Daniels’s Literature Circles as they are understood in 2011. That is to say:
- An LC handout cannot take into account whether there is any discussion within that group—the role of discussion director is for posing and answering questions, but, one, who’s to say how much back-and-forth asking/answering is going on, and two, a discussion is comprised not only of asking and answering questions, but reflections, leads and misleads in student talk, cues and miscues in student talk, and all of these can lead to deeper learning
- There is no accounting for a whole class discussion of what students understand and what they do not
- There is no accounting for the tedium and pointlessness of some of the roles (vocabulary enricher, travel tracer, and the one involving spotting literary devices) or in how some teachers employ them (i.e., if there aren’t anything but similes in a text and students have mastered spotting similes, then continuing to do so is pretty much busywork)
- There is no accounting for the addition of new roles as students learn and master reading strategies, the text, and their roles
- There is almost no accounting for authenticity of the work assigned—summarizer, connector, literary luminary/quoter, and discussion director are all valid and authentic roles for students, but if these aren’t part of some greater whole (such as a group/whole class discussion), then it becomes busywork
Just like with anything else, if work is done in isolation, if group discussions aren’t monitored (even worse, if there are no group discussions), if future whole-class assignments, activities, and projects aren’t informed by what students have learned and where their group discussions are going, and if roles and groups aren’t purposeful, short-term, and flexible, then there is little educational value in implementing LCs. But how is it that some experts say “there is no one right way to do a Literature Circle” when there seem to be plenty of non-productive ways to do LCs?
The short answer is that students aren’t Pavlovian dogs who will instantly and successfully respond to anything bearing the title “Literature Circle.” [A longer and more interesting answer lies in the research itself, which I happily append to this article—feel free to peruse it at your leisure.] To expand on this a little more, I’d refer you to Screenshot B where I have circled in green those words that are iterative within the definition of an LC, more explicitly, “discuss,” “discussion,” and “talk.” This is where the research becomes both highly relevant and extremely fascinating. If, at the heart of it, we view LCs as just a written rehearsal within discrete roles for conducting discussions, then we can talk about reciprocal teaching, and more importantly, the dialectical method, which pre-dates education itself. No, actually, the dialectical method employed by the Ancient Greeks was education for them—a gathering of people sitting around posing, interposing, and responding to questions trying to understand and help each other understand truth, beauty, love, justice, society, and the very nature of humankind. So, yes—we should talk about how critical, how essential it is to get students to have discussions with themselves (i.e., think/LC role), with each other (i.e., pair/LC discussion), and with everyone else (i.e., share/whole-class discussion).
In the spirit of full disclosure, just know that as an educator, I outgrew the Harvey Daniels’s method of Literature Circles—rather, what I was seeing was that what students needed wasn’t contained within Literature Circles. At first it was because all of my students were roughly at the same ability level (frustration-level readers about three to four years below grade level); then it was because of not having enough books for the LC groups; then it was because student groups became comfortable carrying out their roles in isolation rarely speaking to each other; then it was because I wanted to break the monotony of students being locked in to a handful of roles that I felt limited students who might not have been academically inclined and/or were outside-of-the-box thinkers; finally, it was because I wanted to find a way to turn students’ thinking around to what their responses to literature could be…and voila: Literature Responses were born!
If I wanted students to become self-directed learners, participants of authentic tasks, and high-achievers of state-wide academic assessments, then I needed to look at what Literature Circles was requiring and modify the actual activities so that these reflected more accurately what students would be tasked with in the future (in school, college, and the workplace). Because I ran a token economy in my classes, students were offered the opportunity to create their own role, one that ideally was to be something approaching what they wished to do with their lives and then respond to the text in this way. How I managed to work in the discussion component, which is truly at the core of Literature Responses, is that I created a pen-and-paper blog to accompany the one on my blogger account; this way students could respond whether or not they had a computer (and whether or not there were technical or connectivity issues that day), and because I incorporated some form of technology, this added a little more cache (and, again, authenticity) to what I was asking them to do. Last, I took the Harvey Daniels’s roles of asking, making connections, and using the text to use as support for one’s claims, along with tried-and-true comprehension strategies such as Reader’s Theater and more esoteric items such as the Toulmin method for argumentation, modified them for my students, made exemplars, and modeled for them their prospective expectations using LR.
Using this method of text response, which:
- Encompasses the NJCCCS as well as newer state and national standards
- Is as open and as limitless as students choose for themselves
- Is rooted in Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences despite its genesis in literacy (and with so much room to grow with students’ imaginations)
- Addresses and embraces the full spectrum of Bloom’s taxonomy
- Encourages students to create and maintain communities within their small groups and their class as a whole…
Students are able to wend way through the stories they are asked to read because they have some intrinsically motivating impetus to steady them as they read: they get to use their critical thinking skills and their imagination to make sense of the worlds within worlds contained in books.
Q: Can students work alone with LRs?
A: Yes, so long as there is some rationale for doing so and so long as there is a discussion after the written work is done.
Q: Can students work in small groups with LRs (pairs, triads, etc.)?
A: Yes, this is the end for which LRs were conceived.
Q: Can students be assigned roles or should they choose for themselves?
A: This is where teacher discretion is best used. Sometimes students don’t work to their potential because they need to be prompted to do so. Being a Predictor for a class or two is fine; being a Predictor for two weeks is unthinkable unless there are extenuating circumstances.
Q: Can students perform a role instead of writing it, like with Interpretive Dance, say?
A: Students can perform and write their roles (as with Reader’s Theater), but one of LRs’ end goals is to fuse literacy with students’ passions and to highlight how these often intersect.
Q: Can I make a sort of tic-tac-toe game or create a “fast food menu” using LRs?
A: You can, although these too should be given some thought as to the student’s/group’s abilities; giving all challenging roles to students who needs extra academic support isn’t very sound and vice-versa for students who need to be challenged.
Q: Which roles should I mix-and-match within groups?
A: Eventually, students will figure this out on their own (if they are working responsibly); at the start, the classic spin-offs of Discussion Director, Connector, Quoter, Predictor, Best-Case/Worst-Case Scenario, Reader’s Theater, Debater, and Takeaway will work in concert very nicely. Incidentally, these are also the roles that should never be stricken from the list of roles no matter which ones are eliminated and which new ones are created. Also, if you do change the list of roles, these aforementioned eight should be listed first as during the initial run of getting to know LRs, it makes finding the core roles easier for students.
Q: Not so fast—I get the part about “self-directed learners” and “participants of authentic tasks,” but, really, how is lending free choice and discussion to student response going to increase state-mandated assessment scores?
A: As the old saying in education goes, “according to the research…” studies show that discussion—especially one adult with a more sophisticated lexicon than his students—leads to gains in vocabulary acquisition skills, reading comprehension, critical thinking skills, and general cognitive abilities. This skill set directly impacts how well students score on tests like the NJASK. The free choice aspect of LRs helps with student buy-in—eventually, they truly do own the text using the roles readied for them as well as those they create themselves.
Q: So all I have to do is have a conversation about anything with my students?
A: Nope—a purposeful and engaging discussion about the text and issues related to the text is what I’m getting at here. This is an art unto itself, so we’re not dealing with just waiting for one student to stop talking so another can start talking; that’s not a discussion. In fact, that doesn’t even qualify as a conversation. What we want is to have students listen to one another, process what’s verbally on offer, and respond in a way that takes the discussion to another place, one that is different from where it first started. A good place to start is to display on the board the OEQs that Discussion Directors created in their groups and put the rule out there that “no one speaks twice before everyone has spoken at least once.” Instructional Conversations such as these are also fantastic for alternative assessments. Not to hold grades out as the be-all, end-all, but holding an IC in place of a test can do wonders for getting students to “think in their seats.”
Q: Cool, so students can just make up any role they want and then use it to respond to text?
A: Not quite—you, the teacher, put the idea out there: “Any student who can think of something s/he wants to do in life where it can be used to respond to the text, creates a title for the role and two- or three-sentence set of directions will get the role added to the LR list…” Obviously, care and judgment should be used as humming, making paper airplanes, and staring out the window would be difficult to work into LRs as authentic real-world tasks.
Q: But if you eliminate the word finder role of LCs, then when do you do vocabulary?
A: Vocabulary should be done for at least ten minutes every day where students are using the words, not merely copying down problem vocabulary, parts of speech, and definitions. Requiring students to use a section of their notebooks entitled “Personal Dictionary” addresses this quite nicely. I found that providing students with the above for vocabulary words (parts of speech and definitions) as well as two sample sentences, and requiring that they create two of their own, and then having students share these in a whole-class fashion authentically addresses two things: that using words is more important than being able to spell them, and two, that most successful readers don’t always look up every word they don’t know, but instead use context clues. In this way, the class is discussing what works and doesn’t work about how words are used as opposed to getting hung up on what the “textbook” definition of a word is. We want students to be able use words and to be able to use context clues to figure out problem words. If one must forgo correct spelling to make this happen, then so be it—when all is said and done, what practical good does it do anyone to know the definition of a word, yet not know how to use it?
Q: So if I just make copies of the LR roles and distribute them to students, my job’s done?
A: At first, laying the groundwork and giving to students all of the background knowledge necessary to just do the basic eight roles (Discussion Director, Connector, Quoter, Predictor, Best-Case/Worst-Case Scenario, Reader’s Theater, Debater, and Takeaway) in addition to giving them time to practice these—a week for each of many of the eight roles—will seem a bit cumbersome, but when students have gained some level of working practice over them, have engaged in small group and whole discussions, and have begun participating in the full spectrum of the writing process, both you and they will understand how writing affects reading, and vice-versa. Truthfully, it isn’t wise to “teacher-proof” anything too much as the adult who is the teacher on record is supposed to be the in-class expert from whom students learn. Making LRs your own is also up to you, but just as with LCs, there are elements that cannot and should not be removed or LRs risk becoming something else, something unsupported by research-based, best-practice methods. The simplest and most truthful way of phrasing it is the following: remove meaningful discussion from pretty much anything and it becomes busywork.
Literature Circles
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Literature Responses, Discussion, and Blogs
References:
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Fitzgerald, J. & Markham, L.R. (1987). Teaching children about revision in writing.
Cognition & Instruction, 4 (1), 3-27.
Guthrie, J.T. (2002). Preparing students for high stakes test taking in reading. In Farstrup, A. E., & Samuels, S.J. (Eds.), What research has to say about reading instruction (4th ed.) (pp. 370-391). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.
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Free Choice
Reference(s):
Flowerday, T., Schraw, G., & Stevens, J. (2004). The Role of Choice and Interest in Reader Engagement. Journal of Experimental Education, 72(2), 93-114. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.
