Evolving Literature Circles to Support Response to and Engagement with Literary Texts
The following extract is taken from PETAA Paper 197: Responding to literature: Talking about books in Literature Circles, written by Alyson Simpson.
Literature Circles (LC) are a pedagogic strategy that supports engagement with literary texts through purposeful dialogue. When LC work well it is because they have been set up by teachers who recognise two key principles. First, they understand the importance of dialogic pedagogy that includes purposeful talk, reciprocal turn taking, collective focus, and opportunities for cumulative learning in a supportive environment (Alexander, 2004). Second the teacher affirms through their organisation of LC reading groups how enjoyment and self selected choice of reading material leads to greater reading achievement (Krashen, 2004).
As LC are small groups that depend on talk about a book, which students have chosen to read, they are the perfect scenario through which teachers can tap into substantive communication that helps to scaffold collaborative learning (Hammond, 2001). As Edwards-Groves said in PETAA Paper 195, talk can play a crucial part in students’ learning but it works best when it is ‘talk with substance’ (2014, p. 11).
The strength of LC is best found when they are purposefully shaped by the teacher, not just as groups for sharing individual opinions but also as opportunities for participatory dialogue. If comprehension depends on being able to make meaning from a text, and ‘filling in the gaps’ (Williams, 1991; Gleeson, 2007) is part of learning to read good writing, then we need to help students read texts in ways that help them bridge meaning-making gaps. Through the dialogic pedagogy of LC we can support readers at all levels of ability to respond to literary texts while they enjoy learning how to read with critical understanding.
Innovations to Literature Circles
Literature Circles are meant to be a flexible scaffold, not a lock step process, so teachers can adapt roles and implementation strategies as they wish. Take for example, a group of three teachers who recently reframed their approach to LC in their Stage 3 classrooms during a small professional development project run at their school in inner Sydney with an academic partner. After the first round of LC was trialled the teachers realised that the discussion was not flowing as well as they had hoped, so they regrouped and introduced two changes. The first change was to have two or more students running the same role in each LC meeting so that the role was interpreted in different ways. This innovation immediately led to richer dialogue, as the other students were able to compare and contrast and make connections between what each of their peers had said. Also, instead of trying to discuss more roles for shorter times, the paired /grouped roles gave the students more time to focus on fewer roles for longer periods of time during their LC session. The talk was more productive. As the teacher reports:
The changes were very simple but made a huge difference to the outcomes. Instead of all students having a role to discuss they had 2 roles. Three students would focus on one and 3 on the other. This allowed for the discussions to be richer rather than just the sharing.
The second change was the introduction of a set of dialogic prompts to ensure that students paid attention not just to the content of the discussion but also to the way they were using discussion to find out more about the books. The prompts were based on the sentence types of statement, questions and exclamation and were signalled by the punctuation marks: . ? and !. The dialogic prompts were named piggyback . = a statement that built on what someone else had said, questioning ? = a follow up question for clarification and challenge ! = an opposing opinion.
The use of these prompts resulted in far greater interaction between the students. In the teacher’s own words:
We created three cards — piggyback, challenge and question cards that the students could pick up while another member was talking. I believe these three cards have made the most difference as they have allowed for greater, deeper, richer conversations … Also due to the cards we had to spend a few sessions working on social skills — Understanding that an opinion is an opinion and that when someone doesn’t agree with you they are not arguing with you personally — it’s the opinion they do not agree with.