Getting All Students Involved

I have always wished I was in a book club. I love discussing books with my family and friends. I especially enjoy reading a book at the same time as someone and talking about our different point of views and similar or differing opinions.  The only time during my schooling that I remember doing anything close to literature circles was in my 11^th grade Honors English class.  The class was dry and boring. The teacher did not make The Scarlet Letter, Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, or anything by Mark Twain and Edgar Allen Poe exciting at all. I never enjoyed writing for his class because he criticized everything I wrote. The one activity I remember, that I actually enjoyed from his class, was something he called “reading groups.”  He had about five or six different books to choose from and the class made groups by choosing what book we wanted to read. The groups made all of the decisions about how much to read and what to talk about at each meeting. It was completely student-run. The teacher only observed and acted as a facilitator when needed. I got more out of my discussions in that group with one book than I did doing almost everything else in the class the rest of that year. I think part of me was not afraid to speak up in the discussions with my reading group because I knew the teacher would not be judging me by my answers or opinions. The discussion was completely open and I felt comfortable in that situation. I will always remember how productive and beneficial that time was for me.  I believe the only mistake the teacher made was having reading groups available once and never using it again, especially since he received such positive feedback from the class.

 

As I read the first two chapters of Literature Circles, I could not help but envision my future classroom working in groups and discussing literature in meaningful ways. Literature circles can be used in such powerful ways in the classroom and it is important to take advantage of such great techniques for the students’ sake. Although there may be some flaws with using this technique in the classroom sometimes, it is still a great tool. There will always be some flaws with everything once in a while. The only bad teaching tool is the one that is used all the time. It should be mixed up and always different in the classroom. That’s one aspect I liked about the “Untracking English” article.  He gave many different options for teaching in the classroom. Although his teaching techniques were to bring together different leveled students, I believe they could really work in any classroom. As long as all of the students are viewed as capable and they come to class ready to learn, all of them have gifts to bring to the class. 

The strategy that spoke to me the most was the dialogue journals. This is an important way to get students to “talk back” to the author and the book. By having students write their own questions and opinions of the text, they “become the authors of their own questions about reading, instead of reading merely to answer [the teacher’s] questions.” This will also make sure the students come to class prepared with something in mind to talk about. When I was in school, I should have taken more time to do something like a dialogue journal. I always shared the same point of view as the teacher did. I rarely formed my own opinions before class or had questions in mind because I felt that the teacher did most of that work for us and we had “right or wrong” answers to his questions. Students need to think independently and on their own terms to be able to think critically about a text. Although I was in honors English throughout middle and high school, I never spoke up in the classroom because I felt like the lower class of the honorary students in the “beauty pageant” (as Jim called high school at the beginning of the article). If my teachers would have used techniques that are described in the article, I would probably have been more inclined to interact and become part of the class. During the reading group, from the beginning of my post, I felt better about myself and more equal to the students in my classroom.