subject: A New Type of Literature Circle Takes Shape [print this page] The idea for Textmasters arose from a need expressed by a group of graduate students that I taught in a summer content area, reading class. We had just finished a round of literature circles using historical fiction. While debriefing the activity, one educator, Mrs. Stelkan (pseudonym), raised the complaint that while she would love to use literature circles in her content area classes, she did not have the resources to purchase the trade books necessary for implementation. Her sentiment was echoed by the majority of her peers; these practicing educators reported that they were assigned a set of textbooks for all content areas and that requests for outside resources were often turned down. Thinking aloud in class, I hypothesized, "Wouldn't it be neat if we developed a kind of Omega Replica literature circle for use with different textbooks?" Eyes lit up around the room.
Mrs. Stelkan, a fifth-grade teacher, liked the idea of developing literature circle roles for assisting students in reading the textbook for several reasons. First, she taught four different classes of science during the dayreflective of the middle school set-up of the school where she taughtbut had only one set of science textbooks. Any reading that was done had to be in class. Next, Mrs. Stelkan was completing a masters' in reading specialization and knew that in order for her students to be successful across the curriculum, she needed to reinforce good literacy practices in her science classroom. Finally, Mrs. Stelkan felt the same need that I did: textbook reading in the content areas needed a change. Literature circles are so enjoyable with all types of fiction and nonfictionwhy not the textbook?
During the rest of the content area reading class, Mrs. Stelkan would come in and show me her ideas for using the textbook in literature circles. She then volunteered her class of incoming fifth graders to pilot our still nameless strategy. We decided to set up this pilot as an action research study.
We began our action research study by following one chapter of traditional textbook instruction. Students read the assigned reading on their own, answered questions provided by the textbook, reviewed the material using a study sheet developed by Mrs. Stelkan, and then took a chapter test. Seventy-three students took the chapter test and the average score was 86%. This score provided the baseline for our action research study.
Next, Mrs. Stelkan brought me in to train her students using the roles that we selected for applying literature circles to textbook reading. We examined both traditional literature circle roles and new ones created by practitioners applying the strategy to nonfiction Replica IWC and content area reading and selected four: Discussion Director, Summarizer, Vocabulary Enricher, and Webmaster. Two of these roles are traditional roles: Discussion Director and Summarizer. One role, the Vocabulary Enricher, is generally applied to nonfiction literature circles. The final role, Webmaster, was one Mrs. Stelkan created to reflect the fifth-grade reading standard that asked students to apply knowledge gained from reading to a variety of graphic organizers. For all roles, we rewrote the tasks to reflect textbook structures. These tasks are summarized in Table 1.
The name Textmasters was developed to reflect the nature of the strategy. For a student to be a "master" of any text they read, they must be competent in all of the responsibilities we chose: ask good questions (Discussion Director), summarize what they read (Summarizer), learn about new words (Vocabulary Enricher), and organize important information into graphic organizers (Webmaster).
