Lit Circles

This past week in Young Adult lit we tried something new: Literature circles. It was an interesting concept to say the least. Most of the time in my classes here and in high school we would just get into groups and discuss what we read, and there was really no in depth or digging deeper into the text and most of the time once we did the brief over view of what we read everyone would get off topic. In this literature circle we were all divided up into 7 groups, not necessarily with our friends, and each person gets a worksheet with a position/task on it and we were given a few minuets so each person could peruse the section of the book we're on and take notes depending what task we have. Then after we report back to each other and because of this literature circle we are basically all looking for different aspects of the same section of the novel so we different perspectives and was of looking at things that we may have not seen because we focused on our own. I actually thought this was an interesting activity. It benefited me because I hadn't got as far in the book as some of my group members so  they helped fill in the holes. I would like to do this in a high school classroom because I feel as though it will get them thinking critically by completing each task in their position.