Ep 65: Literature Circles: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
Speaker1:
Hey, teachers, if you have a classroom and a commute, you're in the right place. I'm your host, Rachael, and I want to ride along with you each week on your ride into school. This podcast is the place for busy teachers who want actionable tips, simple strategies, and just want to enjoy their job more. Let's go.
Hey! Welcome to another episode of The Classroom Commute Podcast, I'm Rachael your host. Thanks so much for joining me today. In this episode, we're going to cover something that I have not yet talked about here on the podcast, so I'm excited to dive into it. It's all about how to use literature circles in the upper elementary classroom. And if you are listening to this podcast, when it first releases, then you might consider using literature circles in your classroom. Now, because it's spring time, you've been with your students for almost an entire school year and you really have gotten to know them well. For me, I don't think that literature circles are a great thing to use at the beginning of the school year when you're just getting to know your students. I think it's something that you might want to hold off on until you know them well. If you're listening to this episode and it's another time of year, maybe it's the beginning of the school year or just a month or so in, I would listen to the podcast, but then hold off on using literature circles with your students until you have really gotten a good grasp of where they are because there are a lot of moving parts of literature circles. You don't want to rush into them.
Let's dive in. I think that you would agree that a major component of successful reading instruction is variety, right? Variety in the types of books your students are going to read, variety in how you present new skills and strategies, and variety in the way that students interact with the books themselves and each other. If you're reading instruction, right now as it stands, could use a little bit of a shake up, then literature circles might just be the variety that you and your students need to breathe new life into your reading time together. Now, literature circles are nothing new. They've been around since the 80's and were designed to help create and encourage student-centered discussion. Now, I don't know about you, but when I was in school, it was not student-centered. It was very teacher-centered. The teacher led the discussion and the students basically took their lead and responded according to what their teacher was saying and doing. The literature circle format is really designed to provide a much more flexible atmosphere because in literature circles, students are allowed greater choice of what they study and greater independence to collaborate as a group. I love giving students choice in the classroom. I've talked about it multiple times here on the podcast, and I'll link to a post all about how to give students more choice in the classroom in the show notes. You can get there by going to classroomnook.com/podcast/65, you can learn all about how to get choice in your classroom. As it relates to literature circles, it is a great way to provide students some meaningful choice in the classroom without letting it be a free for all, it will still give them a little guidance. Literature circles do still have structure but there's a whole lot more choice involved, which makes it a really great thing for the classroom.
I never like to assume any knowledge, I like to give you the basic understanding before we dive into the details so if you are new to literature circles, let's cover the groundwork first. The basic definition of literature circle is a group of students who gather to read, study, and discuss the books that they have chosen to read. The key being the books that THEY have chosen to read, and the discussion is led by the students. Each member of the literature circle is expected to participate and members of the group work together to deepen each other's understanding of the text through verbal, written and artistic responses.
Individuals in a literature circle are assigned roles that allow them to guide the discussion of various aspects of the text. These roles might include a word collector, a questionnaire, an illustrator, a connector, and a summarizer. Let's break each of those down. A word collector, this student's role is to make a list of interesting words found in the text, then to share them with the group. The questioner role is to create a list of questions that can be used to spur on discussion. We'll talk a little bit more about what types of questions the questioner can create. A list of the illustrator is just how it sounds, draws important characters, events, and settings from the reading to then share with the rest of their group. The Connector makes text-to-text, text-to-self, text to world connections from what they're reading. And the summarizer, of course, just writes a quick brief summary to prepare and share with the group when they come to the meeting so that's got to be prepared ahead of time. These are the more typical roles that a literature circle has. Yours may look a little different, but these are the more traditional ones that come with it. Each student in the literature circle is assigned one of these roles. They get really good at it and then they can switch it up and take on a different role. You typically want to give a literature circle member one role to really focus on for a couple of weeks before switching it up.
Now, in my literature circles that I did in my classroom, I had students complete something called my 'Think Sheet' and the 'Think Sheet' for each role is going to look a little different. The illustrators 'Think Sheet' is going to have sections where they can draw their illustrations of the characters and settings and events. The connectors 'Think Sheet' is going to have areas where they can record their connections. The word collector is going to have a 'Think Sheet' that might have a chart where they write down a new word and what the word means and why they think it's important and so on. Each role is going to get their own specific 'Think Sheet' that they can use while preparing and reading for their literature circle meeting. When the groups meet with their literature circles, they'll share their 'Think Sheet' with the group. That's what the students are going to use to guide their discussions. 'Think Sheet' can help guide conversations and keep everyone accountable for their reading. It also just helps to make sure that not one student is going to dominate the conversation. Each student in the literature circle has a specific role and they're going to present their role to the group. As your students become fluent in each role, you might even decide to transition them into performing all roles each time they read. I have a 'Think Sheet' actually over in our Members Resource Library in the Reading Section that you can check out and it includes all of the roles on one sheet. Make sure you check that out over at the show notes. If you're not already a member, you can sign up for free, snag this 'Think Sheet' and use it with your students. I'll also include an image of the individual 'Think Sheet' that I've used with my students in the past so you can get an idea of what each 'Think Sheet' looks like with each student. Boy, try to say that 10 times fast. 'Think Sheet'. Make sure you grab the free one and check out the picture with the individual ones over at the show notes as well. Keep in mind here that literature circles allow students independence, but they're not a free for all. They are structured and these 'Think Sheet' help provide that structure so that students can take responsibility and accountable ownership for their learning experience. You'll find that when you grant them this ownership, they really enjoy it. That becomes a motivator for your students to want to be an active member of their group that they're working with.
Speaker1:
Now, before we dive into the nitty gritty here about literature circles and how to use them in your classroom, literature circles are meant to be only one part of a balanced literacy curriculum as opposed to a replacement. They're meant to be an aide in developing critical thinking and reflection skills, but they're not designed to be the entire program. In fact, you shouldn't be doing literature circles all year long. It's another tool that teachers can use to foster true love of reading. Remember, variety is the key so this is just one variation of instruction that you can sprinkle into your reading instruction throughout the year.
All right, you might be thinking, why should I use literature circles in my classroom? I have four reasons why you might want to consider adding this as part of your reading instruction. They are collaboration, choice, voice, and fun. Let's break up all of those together. First is collaboration. Literature circles encourage collaborative learning. It's built right in. It's kind of baked right into your literature circle format. They're going to be taught to use each other as resources and help one another understand what they're reading. To do this, the teacher is going to have to provide some guidance and support and we're going to talk about that in a minute. The second reason to use literature circles is choice. I've already mentioned that in this episode and other episodes that students really thrive and take ownership when they are given the power of choice. In literature circles, students are usually allowed to select one book for their entire group to study. This opportunity to make guided choices leads students to feel more engaged and more motivated. They'll be more likely to really want to read that book if they're the one that's choosing it. The third reason is voice. You might be surprised to hear that students actually get tired of hearing us talk. Sense my sarcasm. Literature circles gives students the opportunity to do the talking, they can use their voice and their opinion and offer their own analysis and engage in productive discussion with friends as well as other students that they might not otherwise talk to. Literature circles give students voice and it gives them the opportunity to share that voice with other students. Then finally, a huge component of anything in your classroom is that it's fun. If something is fun, you know that it's going to be a hit with students. Making reading fun is crucial to encouraging reluctant and struggling readers. If you're wondering why you should use literature circles, I gave you four reasons, collaboration, choice, voice and fun.
All right, let's shift gears here and start talking about setting behavioral expectations for literature circles. Make no mistake, monitoring multiple literacy circles is going to be challenging. If you've been with me, you know I'm a biggy on setting expectations and being very clear about those expectations with your students. Not all students have learned the necessary skills to cooperate in small groups. You are going to have to invest a significant time beforehand showing students how to work collectively when working in literature circles. There are a number of potential distractions that can knock a group off task. For example, the noise level from one group might prevent another group from being able to concentrate. You need to talk about your expectations for how it should sound in your classroom while literature circles are going on. Literature circles can be overwhelming for the teacher because there are so many things going on at once, so it's again important to help students learn how to be independent so that they're not all coming up to you with 25 different questions while they're trying to work in their literature circle group. Like I've mentioned on other episodes, when we talk about behavioral expectations, I always like using a Looks Like/ Sounds Like chart where I teach students what the literature circles should look like and what it should sound like. For example, it might look like, students looking at the speaker and everyone looks like they're on task and they have all their materials out. It sounds like there are low voices in each group so that they're not distracting other groups. It sounds like only one person is talking at a time. There are on task conversations. You can physically make this chart with your students and maybe even have this chart somewhere for student reference in their own groups and have them refer to that and you refer to it often as well. Keep in mind here that you will have to give them constant reminders of these expectations, especially when you first start them. Most students enjoy doing group work so the behavioral issues can usually be dealt with these simple reminders. Another thing to keep in mind is that all students should be participating fully during literature circles. If you notice, a student is shying away from the conversation, discuss it with that student privately or join the group for a moment and draw that student into the discussion with a direct question. A lot of your issues in literature circles can be solved with simple reminders and guidance of you getting right there in with the group and modeling exactly what your expectations are.
That kind of leads me right into my next point, we should be encouraging meaningful discussion and accountability in literature circles. Learning to participate both by listening and by contributing in meaningful discussions can be difficult for a lot of students, especially when first starting out. Simply finding something to say about what has been read may require skills that students have not yet developed. Kids have to be taught and given plenty examples of how to discuss a topic in depth. First, it's necessary to define exactly what makes a good discussion. In a good, meaningful discussion all participants are accountable. In other words, they do things like, listen closely and carefully, add on to each other's comments, use clarifying questions to make sure that they fully understand what their other members have said and they participate in respectful debate. A good way to teach students the skill of meaningful conversation is providing them with examples of accountable talk. Now, I've actually mentioned accountable talk multiple times here on the podcast and just the last few episodes, I will link to the episode that I did all about accountable talk which is Episode 57. You can head right over there at classroomnook.com/podcast/57 and I will also link to it in today's show notes. That episode is going to go really deep into what accountable talk is but let's just review it real quickly.
Right now, accountable talk can be broken down into three simple groups of ideas or phrases that students can practice using. These groups are, one, phrases to add on, these are used when students have something to add on to what's already been said, something like, 'Hey, I think...' or 'Have you also thought about?' Or 'I agree or disagree because...'. That's one type of accountable talk. Another type of accountable talk is phrases to clarify. That's when students use phrases when they don't understand something that has been said. That might sound something like 'I was wondering...', 'Could you explain.' or 'When you said blank, I didn't understand.' Those are phrases to clarify. The last group of accountable talk are question phrases. These are not questions like 'Did you like the story?' or 'What was that character's name?' These are questions that keep the conversation flowing and give the group something to think about, something like 'Does anyone think?' or 'How would you feel if?' or 'I was wondering, what do you think?' Those types of questions don't have an answer. They don't have a yes or no answer. Rather, they have multiple answers that any one student could answer and have a different answer. We want to encourage students to use those. I often call these thick questions because they're questions that have multiple answers to it. Again, those are the types of accountable talk, phrases to add on, phrases to clarify, and question phrases. Make sure you are encouraging your students to use all three of those. If you want a little help in that, I've got a free set of posters over in our Members Resource Library that has one poster for the questions, one poster for the phrases to add on, and one poster for the clarification phrases. Grab that free resource and use it with your literature circles.
Now, I want to give you some step-by-step guidance in how I roll out literature circles with my students so you can have a little bit of an idea of how I structure this in my classroom. I break it up into several different lessons. The first lesson that I share with my students is quite simply, what our literature circles? I give them a very simple definition. Something like, it's a group of students that are all reading the same book together and get together to discuss and talk about it with one another. I share with them, just like I shared with you, the reasons why we do literature circles. I put it in kid-friendly language. I say things like, it's going to help you learn how to be a better participant in discussions and it's going to help you to rely on other people to help you learn better about what you're reading. You want to share with them not only what you're doing, that you're doing the literature circles, but why you're doing it and why it's important and how it's going to help them to become better readers. In this first lesson, I actually read a story out loud to the students. I pretend that we're kind of all one big literature circle to start. I read the story to the students and then I break them up into smaller groups and I give them one of those story cubes, you know, the kind that have a different questions on each side of the cube. There's a little bit of structure there, but it's not too much yet. I let them get into the groups and use that story cube to discuss the story that we all read together. While they're in their small groups, I'm walking around taking notes and writing down observations of what I see. I write down if I notice that one group has basically one student dominating the conversation or I write down if I see something going really well. I write down any informal observations and then I bring students back together and I share with them what I observed. I also allow students to share with me how they felt in that small group discussion. Did they feel like the conversation was flowing or did they feel like they ran out of things to talk about? Then we have that baseline to work from and then I teach them that we're going to learn together how to have really good conversations about the books that we're reading. That's all in my first lesson.
Then I move into a lesson all about those behavioral expectations that I talked about a few moments ago. This is where I set up the Looks Like/ Sounds Like chart. We really talk about what I'm expecting to see when I look at their literature circle and I explain what I would expect to hear when I'm listening to their literature circle. We make that chart together as a class and we really dial in on what the expectations are for literature circles and then we try it again. I read another story or a portion of a story. I get students into groups and at this point they're not divided into the groups that they're going to be with in their actual literature circle. They're just practicing different elements of what a literature circle is going to look like once they actually get into it. Again, when they're in their groups using their story cubes or any other prompts that you might provide for them, I'm writing notes down, I'm observing, I'm writing down things that I'm seeing that are done well. I'm writing down things that I want to bring to students attention so that we can improve on it. Of course, you're never doing this in a way to make them feel bad about how it went. You're just writing down things that you can share with them so that they can get better and better. You're always going to bring it back to that Looks Like/ Sounds Like chart where you're going to refer again to what you expect to see and what you expect to hear in each of the groups.
Then I move into a series of lessons all about accountable talk that we discussed a moment ago. I teach students what accountable talk is. I model it for them and give them lots of examples. Then I have them go out into their small groups and practice it with their small groups as well. I should also point out that they don't have to be in the same small groups every day. It's okay to mix it up each day that you're rolling out your literature circles. That actually is a good thing because you can see which groups work well together, which students may not be a good fit to work together in the same group. It's good to switch it up and let students have practice working with other groups. After several lessons on accountable talk and having students practice that in small groups, we then work our way into using those 'Think Sheet' that I spoke about. We talk about the different roles that each 'Think Sheet' is assigned to and I model for them what each role looks like when we go through our read aloud together. Again, this is more than just one lesson at a time when all is said and done. We've spent a couple weeks, at least, going over the foundation of what a literature circle is and having little mini literature circles, so to speak, to have them practice all the expectations and using the 'Think Sheet' before we actually dive into their actual literature circle assignment. There is a little bit of a commitment up front, getting your students familiarized with the format and the function of literature circles, you want to take the time to set it up properly so that you're not launching your students into a literature circle and then just having it being a disaster. Take the time to do it right. Take the time to really set the expectations before diving your students right into it.
Finally, before we wrap up here, I want you to remember when students are learning something new, something new like literature circles and accountable talk and participating fully in a group, is that they're going to need practice, practice, practice. This skill will only develop gradually over an extended period of time. Have patience with your students and with yourself. This is a very huge thing to remember, you can't come out of the gate and expect your literature circles to run like a well-oiled machine, it's going to take time and intention to get your students there, but they can be such a powerful tool in your classroom. When they're done correctly, your students are going to be so excited about what they're reading. Literature circles teach them how to work collaboratively. It teaches them responsibility and it gives them the tools to develop confidence in what they're talking about with their classmates. It allows them to have a little variety in what they're learning. It's a lot of fun for them. When students learn to work together and be accountable and take responsibility, it's so worth putting the time and energy into developing literature circles to be successful in your classroom.
Now, I want to leave you with a couple bonus tips as you start to wrap your mind around how to do literature circles in your classroom. You do not have to have all of your students participating in a literature circle at the same time. In fact, you can have one group doing a literature circle during what would normally be their guided reading time and still continue on with regular guided reading groups with your other students. If you don't think one of your groups is ready, don't do it yet. You can do these little mini lessons that I just mentioned a few moments ago that roll out the idea of a literature circle. You can do those mini lessons inside of your guided reading time and then let that particular group go ahead and start a literature circle. If you don't feel your whole class is ready for it, don't do it. It's okay. You can make it work for your classroom.
Another hot tip that I like to share is that you don't also have to use novels right out of the gate either. If your students are just doing literature circles for the very first time, have them do a literature circle with a picture book. You can find plenty of picture books that are at your students level. Even if you're working with upper elementary students, there are plenty of high level picture books that you can use with them, and the benefit of using picture books right out of the gate is that they can get through the whole process of literature circles from start to finish with a book in a much shorter period of time. They get their feet wet a little bit and then you can work your way up to using novels and longer stories. Consider using picture books as you're getting started for the first time with literature circles, with your students.
Remember, literature circles are not going to replace how you do reading in your classroom. You're going to do a literature circle every now and then. You're going to sprinkle it in to give a little variety in your classroom.
All right. I know that literature circles have a lot of moving parts, and I've covered a lot in this episode. If you want to go deeper and what you want to have your held a little bit here as you dive into literature circles with your students, I have an entire resource called Getting Started in Literature Circles. It gives you everything that you need to do this with your students successfully. All the lesson plans and mini lessons, all the student activity sheets, including the 'Think Sheets', all the posters and bulletin boards, everything that you need to roll out literature circles with your students. If you want to get your hands on that resource, I will link to it in the show notes over at classroomnook.com/podcast/65. Make sure you head over there. I'll also include all the other things that I've mentioned, including those two freebies, the accountable talk posters and that free 'Think Sheet'. Make sure you grab those in our Members Resource Library as well.
All right, that is all for me today. I hope you have a great rest of your day, a good start to your week. I'll be back again next week with another episode. Bye for now.
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