Literature Circles as Guided Reading for Older Students

(About me: I work with 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th graders as a bilingual teacher.  I collaborate with three teachers and spend a 90 minute block with each class.  This is called a collaborative model.)

I'm not sure what age you are referring to, 3rd-5th, 6th-8th, 9th-12.  But I would say that literature circles are perhaps essential in secondary classrooms due to the limited amount of time spent on reading and writing.  However, in the elmentary classroom we can spend 90 to 120 minutes on literacy, which allows for more guided reading to occur.  Depending on the age and reading level of students, guided reading can allow 15 to 25 minutes per group allowing the teacher to meet with two to three groups in 50 to 60 minutes.  (There must be some time to transition, perhaps do a 5 minute mini-lesson and of course to check in with students.)

I believe that literature circles, if used INSTEAD of guided reading, should be used only with students who are above standard or perhaps at standard when many students in the class are significantly below standard.  However, I do use literature circles with fluent readers who are reading at a third grade level, but are below standard for their grade level in addition to guided reading on occassion.  These students still get guided reading most of the time.  However, since I have some students who are two years below level, and I don't have time to meet with each group daily, I believe using literature circles allows me to guide students to analyze what they're reading more deeply when I'm not worried about their word attack skills in the book.  I might use a easier book for this.

I would say that I am very comfortable with and confident in my guided reading instruction.  However, I am less confident in my ability to lead and manage literature circles.  (Of course, I'm only in my third year of teaching and I have received very little training in literature circles.)  In fact, at my school -a diverse, title one school with a large bilingual population, very few teachers, if any, use literature circles.  In my experience, my students haven't been very focused when I ask them to meet to respond to the questions I poise them about their reading, but I didn't spend much time to teach them how to behave.  But once I meet with them to discuss their responses I was impressed by many students ability to answer the questions.  I believe part of the challenge for their behavior was that the questions were too hard for the third graders (it was a 3rd/4th grade group) and many of the students were struggling or reluctant writers.  In the future I might require that they write or I might make it more like cooperative learning where each student has a required role, which would make one student the recorder.  

I should probably do this more often to provide students with on-going test practice.  In the future, I will probably include the questions that will help prepare my readers to move to the next level as readers and a test like question.  I think I should even do a reading unit on literature circles.  I'm doing the Daily Five, but my students get other times to do read to self, or independent reading, and they get bored with it, especially since they are in my classroom and don't have their desks for our hour of guided reading.  I think I'll have to work with our literacy coach on this and do some learning about literature circles. 

Yay!  This is the best part of blogging.  This reflection has given me new focus on how to improve my reading program!

Thanks for posing the question.  I'd love to hear more about how to get literature circles started in my classroom!  What books to read, etc.