I've always wanted to try Literature Circles in my English classes, and this year I finally got to test them out.  I used this resource I found online as my guide, although I think I will tweak for next year.

I strongly believe that the best way to encourage kids to enjoy reading is by giving them more control over what they read.  I attended a really great professional development session last fall where a few of our middle school teachers discussed YA literature and the greatest difficulty for secondary English teachers - appealing to the boys.  So much of YA literature is geared towards girls, since they read at higher rates.  I wanted to find enough choices for literature circles to encourage my more reluctant readers to get excited.  I am hampered in my quest, however, by the availability of books in our English department book room.  Since I was also sharing books with the other junior English teacher, we had to find enough books to offer a variety to our nearly 200 students, as well as make sure we chose books that we were already familiar with (students are unimpressed when I assign them something I haven't also read).  I gave each class the options and let them list their preferences, then assigned them novels and groups based on that.  Most students got their first choice.  The following is the list of books I selected and my rationale for choosing them, as well as the reception of the students.

One of the first professional development sessions I ever attended was called "Mentoring Minds," and was sponsored by a company of the same name.  They used the wheels in a Socratic circles scenario, which as a new teacher I had never heard of. After the demonstration I had to have some, and now use them several times a year to great effect in my classroom.  This post explains my use of Socratic circles and the Critical Thinking Wheels, based on Bloom's Taxonomy, in my English classes.

Most recently, my AP English class had their first Socratic Circle of the year as their test grade for The Great Gatsby.  After finishing the book, I pass out the thinking wheels and do a brief lesson on what Bloom's Taxonomy is in terms of different tiers of critical thinking.  This year our school has introduced Data Walks and trained all the teachers on "Student-Friendly objectives," so the most advanced of my students liked this insight into how we, their teachers, think about our lessons.  

The wheels have verbs on the inside, and a window with question stems that spin around.  I gave them some examples of the easier Knowledge/Recall questions: 
What do you recall about Myrtle's death?  
Who is Daisy Buchanan?  

We worked our way to demonstrating the higher-level questions, like:
Predict the outcome if Tom knew Daisy was driving. (Synthesis/Create)
What would you have told the police if you were Nick? (Evaluate)

Students each wrote two questions for each of the six fields, twelve total.