Lit Circles with Student Choice, Autonomy, & Control

As we approach the end the school year, and engage in our final unit of study, students are in groups, reading a novel they selected (from a provided list).  This spring, the student options are: The Secret Life of Bees, The Things They Carried, and The Road.  Students rated the books after listening to a book talk on each, indicating their level of interest.  Based on their responses, I placed them in groups (as best I could) with their top choices.

Students prepare analyses of what they've read based on a teacher-created schedule; however, students determine how much they read for each scheduled day.  I try to give them as much autonomy as possible, but for this final unit, I selected the topics they would discuss (characterization, setting, syntax, structure, etc) so that they could be best prepared for the final exam.

Here they are discussing their novels on their first collaborative discussion day: