Meeting Your Students' Needs... One Small Group at a Time

Why Small Groups?

We are social beings.  Our students are social beings.  Think of your own professional development and what causes you to engage more deeply… sitting and soaking in ideas independently?  Or do you find yourself more engaged when given the opportunity to connect and discuss ideas and application with colleagues?  Often, it is a combination of approaches that help us internalize our learning.  The same is true for our students.

We know that small group instruction, the opportunity for students to work together with the support of a teacher, is effective practice at any level.  “Hattie’s (2009) research suggests a .82 effect size boost in learning growth from the dialogue of group work” (Mattos, 2016).  Creating small groups allows us to practice differentiated instruction.  Differentiated instruction is not intended to result in completely individualized instruction for every student, but it is intended to better meet the needs of the wide variety of students we serve.  We see guided reading groups in primary grades and strategy-based groups that can work in a variety of levels.  Another way to create flexible groups is based on student needs, as determined through formative assessment.  Flexible grouping is not only great at any level, it works in any content area!

Our formative assessment data provides a wealth of information for us around what students are able to do and what misconceptions they still have.  When one creates groups based on learning needs, it allows a teacher to more easily differentiate content, process, or product for each group.  As groups work collaboratively on a task, it also allows the teacher to insert him or herself with groups to coach, prompt, and cue according to their specific needs (Fisher & Frey, 2014).  "These flexible groups gather students together who need reteaching, additional time, or extending learning."  The key to these groups is their flexibility, “we don't want to enter into systems that result in long-term tracking,” but instead when we create groups by target, by student, we are much more likely to provide responsive instruction for our students (Mattos, 2016).

For example, when reviewing student summaries, a teacher might see students who have all the key ingredients (main idea and supporting details) but need help putting it together in writing.  Other students might be able to recognize supporting details but are having a hard time synthesizing a main idea.  Still others might have the main idea but the details they've chosen are irrelevant.  Each group has very different needs all based around the same target.  A teacher can design collaborative practice for each group that will meet them where they are and help them move forward, while planning to coach or provide the additional instruction each group needs.

If you're interested in collaborating around needs-based grouping and instruction to meet the needs of your learners, contact your coach – we'd be happy to help!

Katie Coudron – Willow Creek & OJHS (kcoudron@owatonna.k12.mn.us)

Joanne Harmsen – Washington & Lincoln (jharmsen@owatonna.k12.mn.us)

Libby Zeman – McKinley & Wilson (ezeman@owatonna.k12.mn.us)

Fisher, D. and Nancy Frey (2014). Better Learning Through Structured Teaching. Alexandria: ASCD.

Mattos, M. (2016). Best Practices at Tier 1. Bloomington: Solution Tree.

Same Strategy, Same Group

Another way to group students for small group reading instruction is by the strategy that they need.  Much can be read about strategy lessons in Jennifer Serravallo’s book: Teaching Reading in Small Groups (especially in chapter 4: “Guided Practice Toward Independence: Strategy Lessons for Comprehension, Print Work and Fluency”).  The main purpose of strategy groups is to provide students with additional guided practice opportunities around a specific strategy.  This could be a strategy that has already been taught in whole group, or perhaps conferring notes reveal a group of students who could benefit from some guided practice with the same strategy. 

The basic structure of a strategy group lesson has four components:

·         connect and compliment

o    explain the purpose of the group and provide positive feedback

·         teach

o   short explanation, demonstration or example

·         engage

o   give students the opportunity to practice in their own independent text and provide coaching

·         Link

o   encourage students to continue the work as they move to independent time 

(Serravallo, page 99) 

With strategy group lessons, the demonstration is a short time, and the guided practice time is longer.  As students move into their independent text, it is important to check to make sure that the text they are using matches the strategy.  During this coaching time with their independent text, the teacher spends time with each student: “I spend, on average, two minutes per student.  I do not linger for two minutes with each student, though.  Instead, I move among them with the urgency of a plate spinner, giving them just the right support as they practice…” (Serravallo p. 107).  This analogy paints a picture of how the teacher not only engages students but supports them and communicates the importance of reading and this strategy. 

If you are interested in exploring the use of strategy groups in your classroom and would like to collaborate, please contact your literacy coach.

Libby Zeman (ezeman@owatonna.k12.mn.us)

Joanne Harmsen (jharmsen@owatonna.k12.mn.us)

Katie Coudron (kcoudron@owatonna.k12.mn.us)

What exactly do you mean by “Guided Reading”?

Guided Reading has developed a variety of different meanings.  In this post, I will be referring to guided reading as a small group reading structure most appropriate with students in the primary grades (K-2) still focusing on constrained reading skills (alphabetics, phonemic awareness, phonics, automaticity and fluency).  During a guided reading lesson, teachers use leveled text to explicitly teach and support students to read increasingly complex text.  The gurus of this small group structure are without a doubt, Fountas & Pinnell.

Assessment and Goal Setting:

The process begins by assessing a student’s reading level.  This is most comprehensively done using the Fountas and Pinnell Benchmark Assessment System.  This assessment will identify a student’s independent, instruction, and frustration levels while uncovering other essential reading behaviors.  Students are then grouped in small groups of 4-6 based on their instructional reading level.  Once the group’s level has been decided, looking through the Literacy Continuum is very helpful in determining goals that will best support the reader’s growth.  Finally, the teacher selects an appropriately leveled text for the group to read. 

Lesson Structure:

A typical guided reading lesson will take about 20 minutes.  The lesson begins with an introduction to the text.  This might include activating (or providing) background knowledge, using new vocabulary words in conversation to discover their meaning, discussing the structure of the text, or drawing attention to the writer’s craft.  Students then independently read the identified section of text as the teacher listens-in, coaching students through confusion as needed by modeling, prompting, and reinforcing effective strategy use.  This is the “beef” of a guided reading lesson, supported time in text.  When students have completed the reading, the teacher leads a short discussion of the text, observing what students say about the text and helping them pose questions to better understand.  The next step is a brief, but explicit, demonstration of a specific strategic action, the previously determined goal, (solving words, adjusting reading for purpose/genre, summarizing, inferring, monitoring, analyzing, etc.) referring back to any part of the text that has just been read.  The lesson concludes with word work based on student need (teach any aspect of word analysis that you observed as needed).  Students can be sent off with a reading response task to extend the meaning.  This might include responding to the text in writing, drawing or discussion.

Instructional Support:

If you are a K-2 teacher and interested in digging deeper into any aspect of guided reading (assessment, goal setting, lesson structure) contact your literacy coach.  Both of us have been working with teachers in Student Centered Coaching cycles through this process. 

Joanne Harmsen (Lincoln & Washington) jharmsen@owatonna.k12.mn.us

Libby Zeman (McKinley & Wilson) ezeman@owatonna.k12.mn.us

Uncovering Engagement

Do you ever sit at your table with your small group and look up at the rest of the students and wonder who is and who is not engaged in their book?  Do you see kids chatting and wonder if they are talking about their books or about what they did over the weekend?  As a classroom teacher, it is difficult to run your small group and keep tabs on all of your students to monitor their engagement.  As a literacy coach, one of the things that I have been doing recently is coming into a classroom during independent reading and tracking engagement utilizing Jennifer Serravallo’s Engagement Inventory. 

The inventory provides information on who is engaged, smiling/making other facial expressions in response to their text, switching books frequently, zoning out, looking at the teacher or other students or other categories that teachers specifically requested.  After sharing the data with one teacher, she commented: “I didn’t know my students were spending so much time responding to text in writing and less time reading.”  Another teacher commented, “I thought those girls were off task with their chatting, I didn’t realize they were talking about their books and their words.”

Many of you have read chapter 3 from Jennifer Serravallo’s book Teaching Reading in Small Groups titled: “Without Engagement We’ve Got Nothing: Helping Children Want to Read.”  Having engagement data can help determine what types of small groups (or mini lessons) might help students move forward. 

If you are interested in having your literacy coach come in during independent reading (or another) time, contact Libby (ezeman@owatonna.k12.mn.us) at McKinley and Wilson, Joanne Harmsen (jharmsen@owatonna.k12.mn.us) at Lincoln and Washington or Katie Coudron (kcoudron@owatonna.k12.mn.us) at Willow Creek or OJHS.  We’d love to help you gather some data!