44 Using Literature Circles to Connect Reading and Writing in the Middle School English Classroom – Lauren Mohler

Lauren Mohler is a public school English teacher in Illinois pursuing her Master of Arts in English. This paper is the abbreviated version of a research project she completed for Dr. Edwina Helton in ENG W682 during Summer 2021. 

Using Literature Circles to Connect Reading and Writing in the Middle School English Classroom

Introduction

Many teachers pursue a career in education because they love it; they have a strong desire to help students learn and to share their love for the content they teach. Moskal, a tenth grade English teacher, explains, “I love reading, and I knew that I needed to help my students find a way to love reading, too” (54). However, when a student does not share the same love for the content, it can be challenging for teachers to find ways to help engage the students and help them learn. Moskal found herself facing that problem and turned to literature circles—“a technique that brings small, heterogeneous groups of students together to discuss texts of their own choosing”—to help her engage her students in the reading process and foster a love of independent reading (Herrera and Kidwill 17). While literature circles can serve this purpose, they can also be used to help build stronger academic skills. When supported with writing exercises and centered on student engagement, literature circles can be used in the middle school English classroom to promote a strong relationship between reading and writing.

Review of Literature

Teacher Considerations

As English teachers work through the process of planning lessons and curating libraries for their students, there are many factors that they must consider. The first of these factors is their ability to access texts. Sam Morris, a sophomore-level English teacher, recalls his experiences with assigned reading in his sophomore English classroom and the many struggles that he faced. He notes that there often were not enough copies of texts available at his school to allow students to take them home, leaving them with no option but to read them in the classroom “often in the less-than-ideal states of sleepiness, hunger, boredom, and excessive noisiness” (Sullivan 24).

Another factor that teachers must consider when selecting texts for their classroom is ensuring that their goals for the texts are aligned with their desired outcome for the unit. Morris found that, in the state-required curriculum he taught, the essential goals of the assigned texts often only underscored the importance of an event or an idea, not building students into better readers. He questions, “Perhaps these are projects better helped students understand the Holocaust or the colonization of Africa, but had the students become better readers?” (Sullivan 26). It is vital that teachers keep this consideration in mind when building lessons surrounding their texts to ensure that they are preparing students to become strong readers.

Student Considerations

Over the past several years, the demographics of public school students throughout the United States has faced a trend. In their report for the 2020-2021 school year the National Center for Education Statistics reports, “Since fall 2014, less than half of public school students have been White. The percentage of public school students who are White, along with the percentage of students who are American Indian/Alaska Native, is projected to continue to decline from fall 2017 (the last year of actual data available at the time of analysis) through at least fall 2029” (“Fast Facts”). This trend in student demographics is one that needs to be met within the curriculum and the selected texts.

One way that English teachers can address this concern within their classrooms is to consider how a book’s characters relate to their students. Books have been referred to as being a window or a mirror for readers. They can show a reader someone who is just like them with their physical, emotional, and cultural identity—a mirror—or help the reader experience a world outside of their own—a window. This metaphor has recently been expanded to include the idea of books serving as sliding glass doors as well, changing readers and typically prompting them to take some sort of action as a result. According to Johnson et al., “The change may not be visible to others and may not be immediate to the reader. Sometimes, though, the reader, like the character, is motivated to take action in ways that will transform his or her world” (572).

Promoting Engagement

Harmon et al. argue that “it is necessary to attend to the role of motivation and engagement, both of which are critical to promoting reading” (584). One way to motivate students is to use peer-to-peer interaction. Armstrong emphasizes this idea by explaining that neurobiology indicates that “adolescents are primed for social learning and not for listening to teacher lectures” (66). This idea reflects Rosenblatt’s belief that texts are “an even more general medium of communication among readers” (146). If this is true, it makes sense that students would greatly benefit from having the opportunity to discuss a text with a small group of their peers. Each student will have their own feelings and ideas to work through while reading a text. Working in a group, however, can serve as a source of motivation and can provide an opportunity for the students to bounce ideas off, thus increasing their engagement.

The idea of reflecting students’ reality in the curriculum certainly is not a new one. Emdin (qtd. in Moskal) defines reality pedagogy as “an approach to teaching and learning that has a primary goal of meeting each student on his or her own cultural and emotional turf . . . [it] allows for youth to reveal how and where teaching and learning practices have wounded them” (54). Reality pedagogy is made up of the five Cs: content, context, cogenerative dialogues, coteaching, and cosmopolitanism. Moskal warns that those who wish to use reality pedagogy in their classrooms must be careful to listen to their students and understand them rather than making assumptions about their needs based on their race. By implementing reality pedagogy in the classroom, teachers can help students take ownership in their learning and make sure that all students are represented and engaged.

Overview of Activity

Nicole A. Moskal, a tenth grade English teacher, utilizes literature circles in her classroom and uses Emdin’s reality pedagogy concepts as the basis for her planning and the structure of the literature circles. The following plans for literature circles were loosely inspired by her plans as outlined in her 2019 article “‘I’m Gonna Buy All These Books!’: Reality Pedagogy and Literature Circles.”

When the class begins a literature circle cycle, students will be presented with a selection of texts. They will have the opportunity to browse them, rank them from most interested to least interested, and explain why they selected their top three choices. At this time, the teacher will use the results to form groups, prioritizing students’ interests and top choices when possible. When students are put into groups for the first time, they will receive a copy of their text and discuss plans for the rest of the literature circle cycle with their groups, planning out their reading and writing tasks using a provided calendar template. During this time the teacher will join groups and discuss with them, allowing the students to have a sense of control and ownership over their work from the beginning while allowing the teacher to support them and direct as needed.

Over the next two class periods, students will begin reading their texts in their groups. Each group member will have a task as designated by their leadership role. Students may have one of four roles: Discussion Director, Vocabulary Enricher, Literary Luminary, or Chapter Checker. The design of these roles is to give students a direct way to engage with the text and promote group discussion, allowing for deeper analysis and reflection of the text. Students will have these roles for two consecutive reading days before moving on to their first writing task.

On days when they are assigned a writing task, students will get to select one journal prompt to complete from a provided list of options. These journal prompts were created with the goal of strengthening the connection between reading and writing. This process will be repeated, giving students a total of seven days of in-class reading and three writing tasks.

Once the final reading day is complete and students have finished their books, they will spend the next three days completing a final project. Students will be given a handout that lists options for their final project. Each option consists of an artistic component as well as a writing component. Students will be tasked with not only relaying the text’s events to their classmates through their visual elements and writing but also teaching their peers pertinent information surrounding the disability that is featured in their text. Having a list of options for the students to choose from provides one more opportunity for enhancing student engagement while also allowing students to use the method that best relates with their text.

Implications for Future Teaching

There are many factors that come into play with executing a project of this nature, especially in the planning stages. Teachers need to consider their intentions for the materials and make sure that their text selections are aligned with their desired outcomes and help promote the development of strong reading skills. They must also make sure that their selected texts fit their student demographic, ensuring that the students have opportunities to feel seen as well as to see and learn about situations they may not be facing. Once those obstacles have been faced, teachers then need to face the unfortunate struggle of ensuring that they can secure enough copies of each text for their students. Before any of these factors are considered, though, teachers need to learn about their students in order to better understand their reality and find out what will engage them in the classroom. While the process may be arduous at times, getting to know what will engage students and fighting to secure the right texts for them are steps that will ultimately increase students’ opportunity to develop stronger skills and result in a more positive learning experience.

The beauty of literature circles is that they can be personalized in countless ways. Teachers can take one model and alter certain elements in order to make it best fit within their classroom. For example, Herrera and Kidwill note that some researchers have spoken against the use of roles “ because they have the potential to lead to stilted conversations that amount to checking off responsibilities rather than rich, text-driven, student-centered conversations” (18). For this reason, some teachers may prefer to forgo the use of student roles within groups in the hopes of focusing on strong group discussion over the text. Similarly, the focus of the literature circles’ texts can be altered to match the learning goals, interests, and age of the students. The flexibility of this activity is one of the factors that makes it so applicable to the English classroom. However, that also means that research is constantly being completed and updated on literature circles and related topics. Therefore, teachers should check for updated research to see what others have found successful in their own use of literature circles and to collect new ideas for implementing them in the classroom.

Conclusion

Rosenblatt argues that words do not have meanings until they are acted upon by a reader. This interaction that must happen between text and reader calls for a strong level of engagement. English teachers are tasked with not only helping students increase their reading skills but to provide them with the best texts for them and to help foster a desire to engage with texts. Teachers need to know the students and learn about them and from them to select the best texts that fit their reality.

Morris outlines his positive experience with switching up his curriculum and increasing engagement in his classroom. He wraps up his article with a plea, stating, “We must recognize that each effective teacher teaches differently from the effective teacher in the next classroom; ‘best practices’ is a dangerous misnomer” (32). Morris’s call to action is valid, but it can be taken a step further. Teachers’ strategies and focuses may differ because of their personal preferences, but they might also differ because of their students. Educators should be tailoring instruction to better fit the needs of the students, and that might change year after year. In order to produce the best reading and writing skills, English teachers need to be willing to make the extra effort to get to know their students first in order to find what will help engage their students in the learning process. Teaching begins and ends with the students. After all, they are the primary reason we are there.