Carousels: Enriching Classroom Literacy Practices through Modeled Teaching

This manuscript describes a hybrid teaching practice that combines components of literature circles with the jigsaw cooperative learning model. This practice was conducted in a sixth-grade classroom to motivate the students to read books of literary merit and to model effective differentiated reading instruction for a teacher who was using a onenovel, whole-class approach. The manuscript chronicles processes and procedures that teachers can use to replicate this practice in their classrooms. Introduction After seven years removed from K–12 teaching, I was hungry for the authenticity of the classroom. As a college literacy professor, I taught elementary, middle school, and high school literacy courses. In these courses, I tried my best to integrate both theory and practice. But at times, I just could not help feeling like a bit of a charlatan. I was professing about practices that I only read about or observed as I supervised student teachers. There were so many literacy changes that had taken place since I was last in the classroom as a teacher. The Reading Wars were over, and most schools in my area had settled into a balanced literacy approach. The influx of guided reading, literature circles, reader’s workshop, and writer’s workshop were practices that I had read about, simulated in my college courses with preservice teachers but did not have the opportunity to apply in the authentic arena of the K–12 classroom. I was feeling more and more disconnected from the practical applications of my discipline and desperately needed some sort of intervention. Being newly tenured and due for a sabbatical, I immediately applied to an urban school district as a grade-level teacher in order to offset my sense of disconnect. Shortly thereafter, one of our partner schools hired me as a literacy coach in an urban school. I was to be the liaison from the urban school to my institution and my role was to place scholarlypartnershipsedu