Readers' theater is "so much more than fluency" : collaborative work among teacher, students and researcher

This five-week study explored the nature of the teacher’s, students’ and researcher’s experience as they collaborated in readers’ theater activities in a third-grade classroom. Through ongoing qualitative analysis of the field notes, student end-of-the-week responses, and taped notes of conversations between the teacher and the researcher, three areas of interest emerged. First, the collaboration between the teacher and the researcher created a unique setting for collaborative teacher research. Second, this collaborative teacher research allowed for the evolution of a negotiated readers’ theater intervention. Third, the students’ interactions during readers’ theater rehearsal groups revealed the challenges students faced constructing meaning from text as well as tensions between individual and group needs. This study proposed practical suggestions for implementing readers’ theater in classroom and suggested a link between sociocultural learning theory and motivation theory