BCTELA

Nicole Widdess teaches in Richmond and is the Curriculum Co-Chair for BCTELA. She is committed to teaching diverse learners and is passionate about literacy. Her current focus is teaching students in the middle years.

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As one of the Curriculum Coordinators, I am pleased to share that our Curriculum Pack sub-committee has developed new submission criteria that reflect current thinking, research and pedagogy. These criteria are also aligned with the ideas and research presented in the pedagogical considerations section of BC’s new K-7 and draft 8-12 English Language Arts IRPs. We hope that the new criteria will support you, our members, in writing up and submitting units of study for publication.

When you submit a curriculum pack, a member of our committee will provide descriptive feedback to assist you in revising and readying your unit for publication. Once accepted for publication, you are eligible for curriculum resource funds ($400). If you are interested in crafting a unit to be published by BCTELA please be sure to review the criteria below. Please send your unit (or proposal for a unit) to Nicole Widdess at NWiddess@richmond.sd38.bc.ca. Once your proposal or unit has been reviewed, we will be sure to get back to you as soon as possible.

 

Overview

• Identifies essential questions and enduring understandings

o These are the big ideas/inquiries that will guide the unit and the skills/strategies (including cognitive and metacognitive) that will be used/developed by students

• This overview should demonstrate links to the 2006 K-7 and/or the 2007 Draft 8-12 ELA IRPs m cuts across outcomes from the 3 organizers and 4 suborganizers of the ELA IRP

Assessment

• formative assessment/metacognitive activities

o formative assessment practices that help students learn to analyze and critique their work and to set personalized goals in relation to shared criteria

o offer students opportunities to generate criteria and strategies that are both contextual and meaningful

o a variety of assessment activities, including performance-based assessment

• summative assessment m performance-based assessment that includes detailed rubrics and links back to enduring understandings

Lesson Sequences

• a clear, detailed outline of suggested lesson sequences including m gradual release of responsibility

o assessment-to-instruction m metacognitive activities (e.g. using and/or generating criteria, self-assessment, goal-setting, and reflection)

o reading, writing, and oral language activities

o well-structured lessons that help students connect, process, and transform and personalize texts, concepts, and/or understandings

Diversity Considerations

• suggestions for adapting based on students' individual strengths and needs

• ways to differentiate based on student interests and context (e.g. text choices, variety of output options, variety of instructional modes)

Additional Documents

• performance rubrics

• handouts used in the lessons

• resources used, and suggestions for alternative resources

Reflection

• what worked especially well

• what came before this and after this in the year

• how this unit built on or was able to be built upon by other inquiries/units

Would you like support in developing a unit that integrates strategic teaching, formative and summative assessment, gradual release and the use of diverse texts using learning outcomes from the new IRP? Consider attending the Saturday Institute at our Fall Conference October 25, 2008. The 2008 Conference will be held at the Delta Hotel in Richmond this year. BCTELA Executive members Krista Ediger, Joanne Panas, Leyton Schnellert, and Nicole Widdess will be facilitating an institute on backwards design tentatively called "Designing Units with the End in Mind." A description of this institute follows:

So many best practices...how do you put them all together to create engaging, pedagogically-sound units that will help your students learn what they need to? Come and spend the day with us-learn about inquiry and backwards design, modeling and gradual release, assessment-to-instruction-and put it all together in a framework for a unit you can use. To get the most out of this session, bring a topic for a unit and sample texts you might use, and any brainstorming you might have already done.

The Curriculum Pack sub-committee members are looking forward to a year of learning together as we explore the new English Language Arts IRPs and develop new curriculum packs to support their implementation.

Theresa Rogers  

Theresa is a professor of Language and Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia. Her areas of interest include youth multiple literacy practices and critical
perspectives on young adult literature. See theresarogers.ca.

Genre Play, Positioning and Critical Interpretation

For the past several years I have been work- ing with colleagues in various school and non-school settings involving youth in a range of arts and media activities.1 One aspect of this work of potential interest to English educators is the way film (video) production can be seen as a new literary form. With more emphasis on multimedia in schools, it seems timely to consider filmmaking, in particular, as a valid and endlessly imaginative form of literary interpretation among students.2

The youth whose work I will share here range in ages from 15 through 19 and have attended or are attending alternative secondary schools and/or are participating in a community anti-violence program. In various ways they have all been alienated from structures and contexts of traditional secondary schools. These alternative school and community sites provide environments that are a better fit for the youth and more open to video work as an impor- tant multimodal or “new” literacy practice.

I like to think of video production as a new form of reading and interpreting literature that is more engaging for a wider range of youth. Video produc- tion breaks down some boundaries between in- school and out-of-school lives. Indeed, some would say multiple literacy practices “travel” across our institutional boundaries (Leander, 2003) as is evi- dent in our work. We are mindful that youth are already very often critical consumers and producers of new media—showing us over and over again that they have things to say and the tools to say it, and their films are created in the intersections of these available resources and perspectives (see also: Burn and Parker, 2003; Goodman, 2003; Sefton-Green, 1998 and 2006; Soep, 2006).

Yet most classrooms continue to privilege print literacy practices (Moje, 2000; O’Brien, 2005), which are historically entrenched in schools and are seen to carry power as a path to higher education. It may also be fair to say, and I would include myself here, that English teachers are more comfortable with print literacy. We love to hold books, to carry them, devour them, talk about them, review them, and store them safely and forever in our hearts and book- shelves. Not all of our students are so enamored.

 

Four Films: “The Blue Bouquet,” “The Making of Othello,” “Hills like White Elephants,” and “Billie Holiday”

Four films described below illustrate the ways youth used film to interpret literature. As part of this process, they played with genre and positioned themselves in new ways in relation to their work, their peers and teachers, while critically interpret- ing literature.

The Blue Bouquet

The first film is a very short version of the story “The Blue Bouquet” by Octavio Paz (1976). In this haunting and dreamlike short story, Henry wakes from a nightmare and hastily dresses to face the reality of remote Mexico. A lost soul from the American middle-class, a stranger to a wife he left at home, and now alone in a squalid hotel, Henry is warned to stay put for his own safety. However, on a brief walk through the area he is threatened by a peasant bearing a knife, which (he tells the incred- ulous American) he will use to cut the eyes from Henry’s head in order to present this macabre offer- ing of “a bouquet of blue eyes” to his bewitching girlfriend Consuela.

The student, Jake, who directed this film re-interpreted it as a kind of morality play by identifying the hotel owner as the bystander, Henry as the victim, and the “peasant” as persecutor (actually labeling them that way in the credits). The film is initially set at the school (borrowing the principal as the hotel owner/bystander) and moves to a nearby abandoned and graffiti-saturated parking lot where Henry is accosted by the peasant in a reenacted mugging scene. “Henry” pleads for mercy, saying “I have brown eyes.” Jake used hip hop music as a soundtrack (“Multiply” by Xzibit), and exaggerated the fighting by employing quickly repetitive views of the interaction during editing.

In this interpretation, the story becomes less a stylized and lyrical short story and more an action-oriented and messaged film. By incorporating the school principal into the action as a character, Jake repositioned himself and his cast members as having at least momentarily reversed the power structures of schools. They also embodied the story with their own contemporary understanding of violence by recreating the mugging scene and using contemporary rap music. And finally, by placing the film in a space that represented their identities (street-oriented, tough, masculinist) they created a contemporary re-interpretation that traveled across traditional, institutional and spatial boundaries, providing a rich opportunity for talking about literary interpretation. That is, they effectively re-interpreted the story by shifting to a contemporary setting that reflects aspects of their own experience, and providing a kind of moral commentary on engaging in and witnessing violence.

 The Making of Othello

This film by a student named Scotty is introduced with a filmed discussion between himself and a friend in which he explains that he ran into a “casting problem” while filming the play “Othello” by Shakespeare. He decided to do a documentary about the problems of casting in filmmaking, noting that it would be “a different kind of film.” Clips from the documentary itself can be viewed at this website: web.mac.com/theresa.rogers/iWeb/Site/Othello.html

The documentary focuses on issues related to using a cat to portray Desdemona and a dog to portray Othello, resulting in a very humorous transformation of the story. Bits of a script rewritten from a contemporary perspective are overlaid with a serious discussion of lighting, voiceovers, and quality of the technology available:

Actress speaking to Desdemona (a cat): You two make a very good couple and Othello is very hot… but rumour in the dog pound is that he’s been sneaking out late at night.

Narrative voiceover: Here the cat would have an overlapping voice, which is a voice-over.

Actress to cat: Oh, and where is the marriage chew toy you gave him and how long has it been since he’s chewed it?

Narrative voice-over: In this part of the film I would put a voice-over to make it sound like she [Desdemona] is talking.

In this film, Scott has fully positioned himself as a filmmaker who quite seriously comments on the familiar problems a director might face even in the absurd case of using animals as the main characters. At the same time he has rewritten the script for the animals, so the result is a quite sophisticated and layered parody.

Hills Like White Elephants

“Hills Like White Elephants”by Ernest Hemingway (1927) is mainly a dialogue between a young woman and a man waiting for a train in Spain. As they talk, it becomes clear that the young woman is pregnant and that the man wants her to have an abortion. Through their tight, brittle conversation, much is revealed about their personalities. At the same time, much about their relationship remains hidden. At the end of the story it is still unclear as to what decision has or has not been made, or what will happen to these two characters waiting for a train on a platform in Spain.

Two students, Nikki and Scott, decided to film this story with Nikki as the director and the two of them as the main characters. They realized it would be difficult to film in a train station so their setting is more pastoral, shifting the mood. The film employs fairly sophisticated filming techniques; for instance, the film begins with a shot from above that slowly moves down toward the couple speaking “to bring the audience right into the set with you.” The rest of the film includes some of the dialogue and some voice-overs of shots of the couple in a field.

What is most striking about this film is that in the middle of the film a sonogram image of a fetus dissolves in and off the screen, and at the end are pregnancy help lines. According to Nikki she didn’t realize when she first read the story that it was about abortion, but after she storyboarded the voice-over line, “Once they take it way, we can never get it back,” she realized she needed to put in help lines at the end.

In this way the film becomes a hybrid genre combining storytelling and public service announcement (PSA) ele- ments. The choice of music—Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata”—contributes to what they referred to as the “seri- ous” and “sorrowful” tone of the film. Hip hop, they felt, would be “too youth” for their purposes. Nikki and Scott updated the story and its themes and repositioned themselves to speak about serious issues with peers (unwanted pregnancy) through their re-interpretation of the film.

Billie Holiday

This film was made by a young woman (“Kim”) who par- ticipates in an after school anti-violence program. This was one of the first films she made and while it is quite simple in its approach, the result is powerful. Billie Holiday’s performance of “Strange Fruit” is well known and available for viewing on the web. The song is based on a poem by the same name written in by Abel Meeropol (pen name Lewis Allen)in 1937. He wrote it after seeing a photograph of the lynch- ing of two African American men in Indiana. The lyrics begin: “Southern trees bear a strange fruit, / Blood on the leaves and blood at the root, / Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze, / Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.”

In Kim’s film, the song begins and the images shift between stock photographs of Billie Holiday at work and thvideo of her singing, using a "grainy" editing effect. As the film progresses, Holiday appears to become older and more despairing, both in the photos and the video. At one point the screen goes dark, and in the last scene there is no sound, creating an eerie and foreboding feeling.

While the film is made entirely from Internet images, the overall effect of the short film is quite a moving statement about Billie Holiday and her embodiment of the poem's sorrow, as well as the tragedy of its content. As Kim says, she wanted to capture the melancholy and show how Holiday was interpreting the words and her reaction to them-"to tell the story of her essence," which she thought people might not otherwise see. For her, the important element was how Billie Holiday interpreted the poem and how she (Kim) could impose another layer of interpretation to shed light on Bilie Holiday, who is a compelling figure to Kim. Here again, there is evidence of sophisticated re-interpretation across genres and media (poem to song to film) in order to create a unique critical reading.

Conclusion 

These four examples are just a few of the many films youth have made in these classroom and community centers. I believe these more literary films illustrate the playfulness and creativity the youth bring to their work and the ways they use filmmaking as a mode of literary (re)interpretation. In these films, they use image, sound, and text in sophisticated ways to express their understanding. They juxtapose genres, reposition themselves in relation to literary works and to others, and create new sites of interpretation. For these youth in particular, filmmaking provided a way to engage in the reading of literature in unique ways and afforded alternative modes of expressing critical interpretations.

What is also apparent in their work is that they have a sense of the literary elements of voice, perspective, tone, symbolism and mood that can be exploited as they move across written text and multimedia. That is, filmmaking helps students, especially those who are less engaged in the curriculum, to become more sophisticated "readers" of literary works.

Notes

1 A three-year (2001-2004) youth literacy project with teacher (Andrew Schofield) and university colleagues (Kari Winters, Anne-Marie LaMonde) that integrated arts and media into all areas of the curriculum, and a current project that includes a community anti-violence program in which students created videos. In these settings, I have been most interested in the way youth engage in genre play, identity positioning, and critical expression through arts and media production (e.g. Rogers and Schofield, 2005).

2 While there appear to be more opportunities for students to engage in filmmaking in special courses and after school programs, it is less often that film is integrated directly into course work. Meanwhile the technology is becoming more accessible and, indeed, many students already have access to digital video cameras and computer software. For our projects we used iMovie software and Apple computers. With as few as one or two digital cameras and two editing stations (Mac computers) we found we could fully integrate media production into the classroom curriculum. 

Resources

Inpoint at Pacific Cinematheque in Vancouver (www.inpoint.org) offers workshops and downloadable worksheets on studying and producing films (e.g. the language of film, storyboarding, filming, editing, permissions, etc).

References 

Bakhtin, M. M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays. Austin, Texas: University of Texas.

Burn, A. and Parker, D. (2003). Analysing media texts. London: Continuum.

Goodman, S. (2003). Teaching Youth Media: A critical guide to literacy, video production and social change. New York: Teachers College Press.

Hemingway, E. (1927)"Hills Like White Elephants." In Men Without Women. New York: Charles Scribner and Sons.

Holland, D., et al. (1998). Identity and agency in cultural worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. Press.

Leander, K. M. (2003). Writing travelers' tales on New Literacyscapes. Reading Research Quarterly, 38(3), 392-397.

Moje, E. (2000). "To be part of the story": The literacy practices of gangsta adolescents. Teachers College Record, 102(3), 651-691.

O'Brien, D. (2005). "At-risk" adolescents: Redefining competence through the multiliteracies of intermediality, visual arts, and representation. Reading online www.readingonline.org/newliteracies/obrien/ (Retrieved 3/20/05).

Paz, Octavio. (1976). "The Blue Bouquet" from Eagle or Sun? New York: New Directions Publishing.

Rogers, T. & Schofield, A. (2005). "Things thicker than words: Portraits of youth multiple literacies an alternative secondary program". In Anderson, J., Kendrick, M., Rogers, T. and Smythe, S (Eds). Portraits of Literacy across families, schools and communities. Lawrence Erlbaum Pubishers, pp 205-220.

Sefton-Green, J. (1998). Digital diversions. Youth culture in the age of multimedia. London: UCL Press.

Sefton-Green, J. (2006). "Youth, technology and media cultures". In Green, J. and Luke, A. (Eds) Rethinking learning: What counts as learning and what learning counts. Review of Research in Education. Washington, D.C. American Educational Research Association.

Soep, E. (2006). Beyond literacy and voice in youth media production. McGill Journal ofEducation, 41(3).

 

 

Jane MacMillan is a lover of all things literacy and enjoys sharing her passion for literature both with her students at school and at home with her three children.

Christy Rollo knew she wanted to be a teacher from the moment she taught her brother how to tie his shoe laces. She is now having the ultimate teaching experience with her two young daughters.

 

In September of 2006, Christy, a Grade 6/7 teacher, approached Jane, a teacher-librarian with a question: How could Christy engage all the diverse learners in her class, including reluctant learners and English language learners? Jane was new to the school, and Christy had been teaching Gr. 6/7 for a number of years at the school. We were looking to collaborate with the library as a venue. Further, Christy wanted to help all of her learners connect with Social Studies in a meaningful way, even though it included reading a variety of texts, note-making, critical thinking and discussion, all areas in which reluctant and ESL learners may struggle due to gaps in skills and background knowledge. Looking to develop authentic conversation and create a greater depth in student engagement as part of a unit on Ancient Rome, we decided to try something new; that is, bring information books to the traditional “book club.” Thus, “info-circles” was born, proving to be not only a popular choice among our students, but an incredibly rewarding teaching experience for us, as well.

 

Rationale

Literature circles, an offshoot of the adult “book club” (Daniels, 2002), have seen a sharp rise in the past two decades. However, there is a growing trend towards including non-fiction materials in literature circles, as reading for information has become a significant area of concern in schools in recent years. Students need exposure to a wide variety of expository texts (Daniels, 2002), as non-fiction permeates students’ reading both in and out of school (Stien & Beed, 2004). The move to information, or content- area, literature circles draws the focus away from primarily exclusive attention to specific elements of text, to a broader program which encompasses understanding of the text as engaging literature. Content-area literature circles offer a new dimension to the traditional literature circle program, one which addresses “both the social and academic needs of the students while maintaining the curriculum” (Johnson & Freedman, 2005, p. xiv).

Johnson and Freedman (2005), in advocating content area literature circles as a premium opportunity for improving information text comprehension, emphasize its adaptability for all learners. For ESL students, it is a chance to clarify misconceptions and hear academic language through discussion. For social learners, particularly in adolescence, it is a chance to share and build on their understanding in a group setting. For more reluctant readers and students reading below grade level, it is a chance to read texts of interest at their instructional level, with opportunity for greater choice, thereby providing opportunity to share equally in a group with others discussing the same topic, as opposed to struggling through a textbook often incompatible with their reading or interest levels.

For all students, it is a chance to clarify and extend meaning beyond the written, and respond to critical challenges of text and topic in a group setting. We think it is a rich opportunity to not only enhance content area instruction, but to encourage students in the ever mindful goal of becoming effective, engaged and competent lifelong learners.

 

Info-circles: Ancient Rome

Introduction

We introduced our students to the unit on Ancient Rome using the KWL (What I Know, What I Wonder, What I Want to Learn) strategy to foster questioning (Gear, 2007) and build student interest. Students shared questions as a class, recording those most important to them. In a follow up lesson, we gave students, working in table groups, unusual facts about Ancient Rome and asked them to decide as a group which were true and which were false. These were posted at the front under “True” and “False” labels, and groups then had to explain the reasoning behind their choices to the larger group. Finally, using Gear’s (2007) OWI strategy (Observe, Wonder, Infer), we gave students photographic reproductions of Ancient Roman sites, which they were encouraged to study as follows: Observations (without judgment), Wonderings (questions about the picture), Inferences (judgments made based on the information gathered). We designed all of these introductory activities not only to heighten interest in the upcoming unit, but to further develop strategies and group processes the students would need as members of the upcoming discussion group format.

One of the significant elements of the unit was the concept of developing and pursuing “powerful” or “thick” (Gear, 2007) questions. Students looked through various information books and kept a running list of the questions they had. At various points, small groups shared their questions with each other, and, as a group, picked the top 3-4 “thick” (deep thinking) questions to share out with the class. Christy recorded these questions on chart paper for further use in the discussion group format. Students then sorted their questions into “thick” and “thin” categories, and justified their reasons for the choices made. Throughout the unit, we asked them to evaluate their own questions and group discussion in light of the “thick” questions posted, to decide if they had been answered or if they required further research. Examples included questions such as, “What gifts have the Ancient Romans given us?”, “What was Rome’s greatest achievement?” and “Why was Rome able to build such a powerful empire?” The questions were revisited throughout the unit.

Concept-driven vs. text-driven approach

We decided upon a combination of concept-driven (multiple books in one group) and text-driven (single book discussion) approaches, not only to accommodate our diverse learners, but also to provide greater opportunity for the sharing of multiple viewpoints. Because students were reading books appropriate to their reading levels, grouping them solely by text would have limited the discussion to homogeneous groups. In contrast, the inclusion of guiding groups by concept allowed for heterogeneous groups, with multiple voices and reflections based on the differing texts read. This approach also minimized student perception, and indeed, reality, of grouping students solely by ability. In this way, the topic, rather than the text and its implied reading level, was the focus for discussion.

The literature

We chose texts at a variety of reading levels, with particular attention to reluctant readers, ESL learners, and students not reading at grade level, as these composed the bulk of the classroom. Included were high interest, low vocabulary books, to address the needs of low-level ESL students, as well as non- ESL students with lower reading levels. For reluctant readers, we chose two titles with visually motivating texts sure to draw in those students, as well as the high proportion of boys in the class. For higher level readers, one title offered further detail at a more challenging reading level, with an embedded graphic novel sure to draw others, as well. Finally, we included two texts with material at a mid to lower reading level. The aim in choosing these books was to address curriculum while meeting the needs of all learners. However, we chose the books not only for their reading level or eye catching titles, but because they are clearly written with a number of information features, as well as factual information that directly links to the learning outcomes of the unit.

Info circles

To introduce the discussion group portion of the unit, we presented the “Info Circles Discussion Prompts” sheet (see Figure 1). Prompts included Question (Clarify), Wonder, Connections, Knew-New, and “This was interesting….” Rather than a role approach, the discussion prompts sheets were used to encourage student response while reading that could later be shared with peers in the discussion group. Students used sticky notes to record their thoughts as they read, later transferring them to the discussion prompt sheet just prior to each group meeting.

Figure 1: Info Circles Symbols Key
Symbol	Meaning
?	Question:Clarify something you don't understand
K-N	Knkew-New: Somethingyou already knew OR Something that is new to you
W	Wonder: "I wonder why/ how/ if..."
!	This is interesting!
T-S	Text-to-self connection
T-T	Text-to-text connection
T-W	Text-to-world connection

Initially, we modeled the strategy with a larger group text share, as students read along and shared thoughts. As a follow up, students worked in small groups with a photocopied sheet of text, following the process above, and working together as a group to complete the prompt sheet. Students transferred their sticky notes to a note-making book for discussions. We employed a gradual release of responsibility to students (Maloch, 2002) in the move from modeled response, to small group practice, to individual response activities. The modeling and practice given prior to the onset of the discussion group format was a key means of not only familiarizing students with a strategy and process for stimulating potential discussion, but to build comfort and encourage the group interaction that would be essential to the next stage of the unit.

Group meetings

At the introduction to the discussion group process, Jane gave a book talk on the books chosen for the literature circle groups. Students then selected a book to read. Books were rotated on a weekly basis. Students had one week to read and make note of their responses to the book, both through one in-class period, and during silent reading and after school homework time. As each book was relatively short, we considered this sufficient time to complete the task, which was borne out by the subsequent response and success in completion by the students.

Weekly meetings occurred after one period given to working on their book for the week, initially with Jane and Christy coteaching to ensure all groups had regular contact with an adult to monitor and guide discussions, if necessary. Students met in assigned groups that were chosen at times by common title, at others by suggested topic. Where possible, we placed beginning ESL students in groups with at least one other student who spoke the same language, in order to allow for translation and first language participation. If students were meeting to discuss the common text (text-driven approach), our prompts were limited, with only a general suggestion as to potential issue questions with which they may use the book to guide their thinking. In multiple text groups, we often asked students to consider what they learned from the book in light of one of the “thick questions” the class as a whole had deemed pertinent to their interests and the unit of study. Such questions included: “What was the role of women in Ancient Roman society?”; “How did rank and power play out across varying roles and societal structures?”; “What was life like for the average/wealthy/poor citizen?” Students referred to their prompt sheets to initiate discussion; however, with our encouragement, students moved beyond sharing their written responses if discussion led them in another direction.

The goal was to focus on rich discussion, not the sharing of each post-it on student sheets. We encouraged students to add to their own notes during the discussion, allowing struggling ESL learners to add information to their sheets. In all cases, we closed discussions by gathering the class together again in a large group format, and reviewed information in light of one of the “thick” questions posted in class. Each group had a few minutes to discuss their thinking in light of the question and their discussion, then in small groups share their group’s thinking with the whole class. Finally, students transferred their sticky notes to an exercise book under a heading that named the title of the book and the author, in preparation for the upcoming project that would comprise the unit’s finale.

Closure

After 5 weeks, students met to review the thick questions posted. In small groups, they discussed what they felt was Rome’s greatest achievement, attempted to come to a consensus, then shared their group’s decision(s) on what was the greatest achievement. In a follow up lesson, students met in groups composed of those in agreement with them as to what was Rome’s greatest achievement. After a brief discussion in their new group, each group was responsible for convincing the other groups that their choice was the “best” one. In a fluid debate format, students moved from group to group as their opinion changed, until all felt they had made their final choice as to Rome’s greatest achievement. The lesson closed as students reflected individually in writing on their final choice. The debate was a highly engaging activity that owed its success to the comfort and familiarity of the children in participating in discussion formats. Students who had, prior to the unit, been reluctant oral participants, now freely offered suggestions and moved to other groups without hesitation as their opinions changed.

As a finale to the unit, students worked in groups to create a class book. Each student chose a favorite “thick” question and developed, in groups with others, a page that defended their question, as well as including relevant text features. As part of the process, students worked with others with the same question, fact gathering using a web to categorize response options, before beginning their final product.

Evaluation

The discussion groups, and the unit as a whole, proved extremely popular with the students. We evaluated responses in a number of ways. During discussion, we circulated with notes and a quick scale response sheet in order to record both the rate and quality of participation. Anecdotal notes were also collected, as particular comments by students were recorded and shared after each session. These served to not only ensure we were aware of participation issues, but also to help us guide and facilitate particular sessions and support groups in need of further encouragement. Occasionally, we asked students to complete a “quickwrite” after discussion, in order to assess their perception of both the quality of their own participation, but also the success of the group as a whole. Students also completed reflection responses, with prompts such as, “I used to think…but now I think….” We also asked for feedback on the learning process, through prompts such as, “So far I like learning through info circles because…”, “Sometimes I find info circles challenging because…” and “Learning through info circles is different because….” As groups fluctuated in membership, the support and facilitation we provided were ongoing; however, as students became more comfortable with the process itself, discussions became richer and flowed more freely despite the fact that membership within each group differed from session to session. Finally, at the end of the unit, students asked, “Can we do the rest of Social Studies this way, too?”—a sure sign that the project had been a success!

 

Conclusion

As teachers, we want to develop in our students not only comprehension skills, but also critical thinking and a genuine appreciation for literature. We think content area literature circles have great potential to do this. Content area literature circles provide an opportunity for students to be exposed to multiple materials on a topic, rather than one resource, such as the curriculum text. If students, as Daniels (2002) argues, require greater experience with expository text, content area literature circles are an ideal way to provide that exposure in an authentic and relevant way, while providing students with a variety of reading materials at their level. Meaning is constructed with not only a strong emphasis on text engagement, but also with opportunity to link content with background knowledge, personal connection, and opportunity to entertain multiple viewpoints. Further, where fiction “[l]iterature circles prepare and strengthen critical literacy skills through the use of higher order thinking skills” (Dawson and FitzGerald, 1999, p. 4), so too may content area circles, as students have the opportunity to discuss issues, challenge viewpoints, and clarify thinking through discussion with their peers.

The social aspect cannot be undervalued in its contribution to such critical thinking skills, as “a group working together can construct knowledge to a higher level than can the individuals in that group each working separately” (Wray & Lewis, 1997, p. 19). Students are powerful peer models, and info circles offer a unique opportunity for this at an age when peer power is at times of more impact than any teacher-driven lesson. Finally, from an assessment standpoint “listening to student- led discussions also provides valuable information on how students are applying strategies such as making connections, summarizing and synthesizing, or finding the main points” (Robb, 2002, p. 30), which further drives instruction and provides authentic opportunities for evaluation and curricular goal setting. These elements further provide opportunities for students to develop skills and attitudes toward content area materials in a small group environment, using materials at appropriate reading levels, with ample opportunities for discussion and clarification and opportunities for meaningful engagement with text. Further, discussion around information text engages the “info kids” (Jobe and Dayton-Sakari, 2002) who rarely have a chance to share their enthusiasm and passion for information texts in a discussion format.

We strongly believe that this approach lends itself very well to a number of curricular areas, and has the potential to support a diverse range of learners, ensuring success, meaningful engagement, and maximum learning for all. Contentarea literature circles offer a rich opportunity to not only enhance content area instruction, but to encourage students in the ever mindful goal of creating effective, engaged and competent lifelong learners.

 

References

Daniels, H. (2002). Expository text in literature circles. Voices from the middle, 9(4), 7-14.

Dawson, D. & FitzGerald, L. (1999). Literature circles: Reading in action. Wagga Wagga, New South Wales: Centre for Information Studies.

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