Book Study: Reciprocal Teaching at Work K-12 Chapter 5

8:50 PM Sarah Koves 0 Comments

Every week we will be posting our primary (Christina) and secondary (me) reflections on Reciprocal Teaching at work k-12 by Lori Oczus. Grab your own copy, so you can join us this month talking about reading comprehension.

Chapter 5 takes us through Literature Circles.

Before starting literature circles, Oczkus suggests spending 4-8 weeks teaching the strategies to the whole class or in small groups before sending students to work more independently in literature circles. Then you can begin planning your literature circles.

You can organize your groups however you would like: ability, interest, etc. Any text, fiction or nonfiction, can work with literature circles, but she suggests starting with a short, easy read. You can have students meet at any frequency, but you want at least 2x per week.

The Fab Four then become your literature circle roles with the addition of The Discussion Director to round out the students' work. It is also important to teach students the proper discussion etiquette; I do this by creating an anchor chart with the students that includes the norms they want for the discussion.

Oczkus gives two examples of how to teach literature circles:

Fishbowl

Jigsaw

I can easily apply these strategies to my English and social studies classes:

English 11 and AP Literature can study texts in small groups over the course of the year including group-selected novels and whole-class texts.

In AP Psychology students read articles weekly, and I usually give them a choice of several articles on a topic. Students could select their article and form literature circles around those texts.

Here is a pdf summary of the steps for you to open, save, print, and share.