A book in one hand. A computer in the other.

I love how collaborative Lit Circles are by nature. A student might be praised for bringing in a critical element which no-one else had thought of, or perhaps encouraged by a throng of “I was thinking that too!” when bringing up something else. Perhaps, however, I’m being too optimistic? After all, we don’t go far these days without encountering the viewpoint that attention spans in digital-age teens are shorter and bored quicker by traditional literacies. Are Lit Circles, or a young adult book like A Thousand Shades of Blue adequately contemporary for the digital age?

In a one-sentence summary, Thousand Shades is about a teen girl who travels from Ontario to the Bahamas on a sailboat with her family and encounters relationship difficulties, moral ambiguities and risky teen situations. I imagine a book like this could interact with the teen-age digital world. Firstly, the book is written in the first person, partially in present tense and partially in past tense. This is a very common style in which to write the journalistic and documentary-style social media posts which the hot-spots of the internet are rife with. A book like Thousand Shades could inspire students to write their own travel-narrative blogs based on real travels or metaphorical travels. In this regard, the novel provides an informal and conversational, but also literarily commendable format to aspire to. Most students are already representing themselves through text online. Assessing the elements to increase reader engagement and story-building technique are lessons which Thousand Shades could help to teach. Students could be encouraged, in their Lit Circles, to search for techniques the author uses to make us empathize with the protagonist, patterns in the story, or sentence lengths and effects. A Thousand Shades is written in short chapters and shorter sub-sections. Students could analyze the mechanisms of a single chapter or subgroup and then compare it with their own blog posts.

The online world also works well with the Lit Circles research components. Not only could students use online encyclopedias to look up nautical jargon, Google maps to chart the path of the Inter-Coastal Waterway, or online tour-guides to discover the history of the Bahamas, but students could directly email Thousand Shades’ author with questions (something which Stevenson encourages and makes easy on www.robinstevenson.com) and then return to class with the answers.

Thousand Shades has no pictures and in the online world it is uncommon for pages to be text only. Why not encourage a collection of digital images which could be put in an imaginary picture version of Stevenson’s book? Tracy Tarasiuk writes about having students create more multi-modal digital interaction with their novels, noting that student comprehension improved as they “chose music, sound effects, and images, [and] revisited their novels for clarification of the plots, characters, and central themes” (p. 549). Tarasiuk also suggested having students build, or contribute to an online Wiki about the novel they had read. “Instantly, I noticed that students put more effort into the work they completed on their wiki pages than they did on regular worksheets” (p. 548) writes Tarasiuk.

I think I’m starting to catch onto how Lit Circles, a book like Thousand Shades and the digital age can all serve the purpose of improving literacy in the modern classroom.

Works Cited:


Tarasiuk, T. J. (2010). Combining traditional and contemporary texts: moving my english class to the computer lab. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 53(7), 543-552. doi: 10.1598

Lit Circles

Recently, the students in my Young Adult Literature class and I were asked to participate in “Lit Circles”, the hippest, not-so-recent innovation in grade-school literature classrooms. The exercise works like this: you get in a small group of students who, together, are to read the same book, then individuals in the group are assigned a role to play. There are a number of roles, including “summarizer,” “researcher,” and “illustrator.” The idea is that in the next group session, each person will have something unique to bring to discussion. For instance, the summarizer summarizes the book for the group, the researcher brings some background information about the book, and the illustrator draws a picture which is representative of some part of the book. My group was assigned A Thousand Shades of Blue by Robin Stevenson, and, despite the fact that the Lit Circle model we were testing was geared for teens, I found the exercise invaluably illuminating.

I realized that the variance in roles allowed us to pick roles we liked, or wanted to challenge ourselves with. I was assigned the “Researcher” role, and I quickly realized that, although it was not an overbearing task to find enough background information to bring to class, it felt good to be able to share the information I had found with my classmates. I was fast realizing what confidence-building attributes Lit Circles embodied. I saw how the model necessitates everyone, from the most shy to most outgoing, to share in discussion, therefore naturally prohibiting the conversation from becoming off-topic or dominated by one person. Lit Circles are also highly malleable; group members can take more than one role, trade roles, or even make up new roles. It’s a model made to adapt. I could see it working well in the Young Adult’s classroom.

Think outside the box! Lit circles encourage unique skills or specific interests in students. The “Illustrator” role, for instance, encourages a creative and visual response to a text. There is a “Connector” role which encourages the student to draw connections to their lives or things they know about. At first I thought this was ambiguous, but then I realized that was what I liked about it. Young readers could bring in a song which they think goes with their book, they could bring in a poem they wrote in response to the book, they could simply bring a list of questions which came to mind while they were reading the book. There is no word-count on written responses. There is not even necessarily a mandate to hand-in a physical product. There’s no doubt that this is problematic for a teacher who is used to grading on something more tangible than participation, but the BC ELA reads that

“Effective teachers focus on passion…think of adolescent learners as active constructors of meaning…increase their fluency and develop their skills as thoughtful and strategic readers…[and] gradually release responsibility for thoughtful literacy practices by requiring that students think about what they have just read” (BC ELA, BC Ministry of Education, 2010).

In my mind, these goals are better achieved by a strategy like Lit Circles than a testing process which grades students based on a passionless rubric.

Peggy Silva wrote about her own education, recalling that teachers “who made a difference offered me total immersion in their subjects, not instruction in answering multiple-choice questions” (p. 31) Harvey Daniels tackles the problem of grading without compromising the immersive value of Lit Circles. He suggests that the process itself should be graded based on a multifaceted rubric designed with input from students. “In this way, we bravely grade the activity itself—peer-led small literature discussions—rather than some surrogate outcome” (p. 14).

In my last post I admitted that contemporary YA literature was not encouraged in my high-school classroom.
Now I wish it had been, and that something like Lit Circles occurred to help me realize the commonality of experience and collaboration of skills literacy can, and indeed should, be.

Works Cited

British Columbia Provincial Board of Education, IRP Guidelines. (n.d.). English language arts grade 10

Daniels, H. (2006). What's the next big thing with literature circles?. Voices From the Middle, 13(4), 10-15.

Silva, P. (2003). Can we read today, or do we hafta do english? The English Journal, 93(1), 29-32. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/3650566