More on Literature Circles

Reading these chapters opened up to me the options a teacher has with LCs. If I do choose to use this method in my classroom (which is pretty likely) I would probably use them a couple of times a year intermittently, but not all the time. The roles seem like a good idea to start off with, because I do worry with this method that students will not vocalize as much as they'd be expected to, especially with those students that are not "readers." I would probably use the roles as journal prompts in order to eventually assimilate the students into free writing journal entries. The book talks about teachers who are too interruptive and try to control the discussions too much. Again, I think a little more teacher facilitation at the beginning of the process would be helpful, but out of place once the students got the hang of things. I also found a lot of the general tips for up-and-coming teachers really helpful. For instance, Daniels gave the listing of favorite Lit Circle books in Appendix C, the listing of peer reviewed journals and the methods for building one's classroom library in order to show us what we will be dealing with once we get in the classroom.

However, I found it interesting that in Nancy Steineke's section, she said that groups need to mix it up so that they don't fall into the same ruts. Somehow I don't think students would do this on their own, so there would probably need to be days when the teacher says, "Today, do this first..." or "Consider this in your discussions." I also wanted to point out Sharon Weiner's observation: "Too many of my kids were unwilling to trust their own responses - they far too often wanted to know what the 'official' interpretation of an event or character was or what I (the allegedly infallible teacher) thought the story 'meant'" (Daniels 172). I feel like I always was, and to a degree, still am that student. I always think back to the first time I read "Metaphors" by Sylvia Plath in my AP English class. When the teacher announced that it was about a pregnant woman, all the other students agreed that's what they thought it was about. But I didn't get that at all out of the poem, and it seems like I never seemed to get that "accepted" meaning everyone else understood. So in this way I can identify with the suggestion that students should not be told the accepted interpretations of a work, but instead discover what their experiences lead them to believe about it. Maybe once students are done hashing out their viewpoints they can be told, but they need to understand that it's not always about seeing what everyone else sees. In fact, a perspective that strays from the everyday is what is truly valuable in my eyes.