Action Research Final
...my second year as a MACT student and learned about this thing called Action Research. I thought “Wow! What a perfect time! I wanted to learn more about Literature Circles and how it can affect my students’ attitudes and here was a perfect set up on how to make my research more useful!” I went into the 2001/2002 school year knowing that I would implement my action research and use literature circles again. So, here we are a year later, another attempt at literature circles and a feeling of success. Preparation and Implementation Through my research I learned a lot more about what the concept of Literature Circles is. In their book Guiding Readers and Writers Grades 3-6 Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnel define literature circles as an instructional approach that involves these key elements: 1. Reading and thinking about works of literature, 2. Collaborating with others to reflect on, analyze, and criticize literature, 3. Developing and sharing aesthetic responses to literature, and 4. Extending understandings through talk and/or writing. Using this definition as a base, I began to think about how I would structure literature circles in my classroom. Another part of literature circles is that each student in the group is responsible for completing a job. Depending on what book and author you get your information from will depend on what jobs you choose. I decided to combine Harvey Daniels and Fountas and Pinell and came up with six jobs that would best fit my students. The jobs that I chose to use were: discussion director, connector, illustrator, summarizer, vocabulary enricher and word wizard. I had originally planned on beginning literature circles in January, but didn’t begin until the middle of May due to other curricular demands. Preparing for this assignment took a great deal of time and money. My teaching partner and I wanted to combine our two classes for this assignment. Together we had fifty-four students. There were to be six students in a group so we were going to have to have nine different groups. Nine different groups meant nine different books. There were a few books in our storage room that had multiple copies. We checked those books, and decided that we would use two of the titles, but we still needed seven more books. We did some research into books that might interest our students and looked for different reading levels. We were also interested in finding different genres. Guiding Readers and Writers Grades 3-6 by Fountas and Pinnell was very useful in finding books. We chose historical fiction, science fiction, mystery, and realistic fiction books based on what our students were interested in. It was off to the local bookstore to buy multiple copies of the seven titles we chose. We both had saved some of our classroom funds, which helped tremendously in funding this project. About three days before we introduced Literature Circles to our classes, we had the nine different books set around the classroom. I thought the students’ reactions to these books were great. They kept questioning us about the books, and what were we going to do with them. We would give out just a little bit of information, we kept their interest right up until the day we introduced literature circles. The day we introduced literature circles there was a lot of excitement in our classrooms. The students were anxiously waiting to hear what we were going to do with these books. We broke the introductions into two parts. The first part was showing the students the books and giving brief book talks on each book. After the book talks were done, we passed out the nine books and gave the students a chance to preview each book on their own. They then had to choose their top three choices. We used this information to form the nine groups. The second part of the introduction was describing the six different jobs that each student would be completing during this assignment. This took the most time because we wanted to show them what the responsibility was of each job. The days that followed the introduction of literature circles were ones of excitement and frustration. The students were very excited to read a book they chose to read. However, frustration began when group members would come to the reading group without having done the reading. This was a big problem in two of the groups. When students didn’t come with their work done, it resulted in less effective discussion within the group. I considered this problem not just a student problem, but also a teacher problem. I will explain this in more detail later in this paper. Data Collection My goal was to find out if students attitudes toward reading changed while using literature circles. To help me answer this question, I decided to give two student surveys. I gave the first survey in the beginning of the year and another at the end of the year. I took the results from both and compared answers. See attached surveys. Data Analysis After comparing the two surveys I found that the results were not as I had predicted them to be. I had predicted there would be a big difference in reading attitudes from beginning of the year to the end of the year. I asked the question “How do you feel about the reading that you do at school?” In September 51% said they liked it, which was a surprise to me. This surprised me because I al...