My last blog post of the 2021-2022 school year began to delve into how I use Thinking Maps to teach reading strategies. The post specifically dealt with the strategy of summarizing. I briefly touched on how I use various Flow Maps for one of the jobs (Summary Specialist) my students do in Literature Circles. While I did provide a cursory overview of what Literature Circles look like in my classroom, I have now decided to devote an entire year’s-worth of blog posts to the subject. The subtitle of my piece is less an homage to Beck and more an expression of my undying love for Literature Circles and everything they add to my students’ learning.
I began experimenting with Literature Circles over twenty years ago after attending a wonderful Steve Dunn training on the subject. Since then, my personal approach has evolved along with my understanding of the Common Core Standards and pedagogy in general. Keep reading to find out what makes Literature Circles one of the most productive and successful parts of my teaching day!
The Rule of 5
Teaching is a mind-bogglingly complex pursuit, and we are given maddeningly little time to accomplish the vast number of tasks necessary to feel successful. The only way to overcome these challenges is through intelligent design. It is not enough to accomplish one goal, no matter how worthy, during a lesson or learning situation. In fact, I have developed something I call “The rule of 5.” It simply states that every lesson I teach or learning situation in which I put my students should accomplish at least five goals. This might sound absurd, and I am certainly not always successful in following the rule, but I do believe it is a realistic aspiration. Take, for instance, a lesson with the academic or cognitive goal: use a Double Bubble map to plan and write an essay comparing and contrasting two major characters in the story. To this, I can build in a language goal (use a variety of compare and contrast conjunctions or transition words appropriately), a communication goal (practice disagreeing politely when discussing your Double Bubble Map with your team), a metacognitive goal (appropriately identify the points of comparison in your map), and an Intellectual Virtue goal (make sure you demonstrate Intellectual Thoroughness when completing your map by recording all of the similarities and differences you can think of). I could even include a sixth, organizational goal: make a schedule of when you will complete the steps of your assignment.
If you have not already guessed, I believe that Literature Circles is one of the most effective ways to ensure that my students are consistently learning, thinking, and developing on a multitude of levels and accomplishing at least five goals simultaneously. The version of Lit Circles I employ gives my students many opportunities to evaluate and make choices; create and follow schedules; demonstrate responsibility; read quality, self-selected literature; use complex Thinking Maps to organize their thoughts; and meet in structured groups to reciprocally teach their peers about what they have learned. In the coming weeks and months, I will devote blog posts to all of the elements referred to above.
High Standards
You may have noticed that, when discussing my “Rule of 5,” I referred to “goals” rather than standards. Not all of my learning/teaching goals are standards. For instance, when assigning a digital Thinking Map on Google Classroom, one of my goals is to improve my students’ proficiency with an app (Google Drawings) they will use frequently throughout the year. Of course, a majority of my goals do indeed involve addressing the standards, and it is not at all unusual for a single Literature Circle meeting to address as many as five or six language arts standards.
I like to refer to Literature Circles as a “learning situation.” This is due to the fact that there is an enormous amount of diverse and personalized learning going on concurrently during the entire process. You cannot really call such an activity a “lesson,” but this is not a flaw or weakness; it is a glorious strength! Reading comprehension is an infinitely complex process, so it should not come as a surprise that teaching kids to comprehend literature cannot be reduced to a series of discrete lessons that can be taught and learned in isolation. It is my firm belief that solving a complex problem usually requires a complex solution. As I like to say, if a problem had a simple solution, we’d know it already. I love Lit Circles because they allow me to put my students in a position to do all sorts of high-level thinking and learning while rigorously addressing standards in reading, writing, listening, and speaking. It would be absurd to try to list all of the standards that can be covered during a round of Literature Circles, so I will only highlight one below and address many others in future posts.
The first College and Career Readiness Anchor Standard for Speaking and Listening is: “Prepare for and participate effectively in a range of conversations and collaborations with diverse partners, building on others' ideas and expressing their own clearly and persuasively.” The Third Grade version of this standard states that students should, “Come to discussions prepared, having read or studied required material (and) explicitly draw on that preparation and other information known about the topic to explore ideas under discussion; follow agreed-upon rules for discussions; ask questions to check understanding of information presented, stay on topic, and link their comments to the remarks of others; and explain their own ideas and understanding in light of the discussion.” Subsequent upper-grade standards contain similar wording. As will become clear in future blog posts, students in Literature Circles learn to be responsible and organized, and the work they do before they come to a meeting is rigorous. There are strict protocols for how students should conduct meetings, and the discussions they have within a meeting are designed to allow students to reciprocally teach each other using the work they have done as a guide. One of the four jobs (Discussion Leader) is entirely devoted to questioning, and the other three participants in the meeting use questioning to encourage their group members to do the kind of thinking their jobs entailed. Given that there are seven meetings in every three-week cycle, Literature Circles help ensure that my students get many opportunities to master this important and multifaceted standard.
As I discovered about half-way through the writing of this post, it is quite difficult to delineate even a fraction of the merits of Lit Circles in a couple of pages of text. I am just going to leave this as an incomplete introduction to the topic and begin work on the series of posts about the practical aspects of making Literature Circles work in your classroom. Please check back frequently for new additions to this series. My next post will discuss setting up your classroom and your students for Lit Circle success!
Writing Every Day,
Eric Lovein
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