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Explore classroom guidance, techniques, and activities to help you meet the needs of ALL students.
Discover new tools and materials to integrate into you instruction.
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Learn what it means for instructional materials and assessment to be aligned to college- and career-ready standards.
Delve into new research and perspectives on instructional materials and practice.
Teach and Guide
By: Dr. Deborah Glaser Posted: 10/06/19 10/04/19This post also appears on The Reading Teacher’s Top Ten Tools Blog. It has been posted here with permission from the author.
Small Group Instruction
I just completed a review of 147 reading texts used in our colleges of education to teach teachers how to teach reading (National Center for Teacher Quality (NCTQ)). One troubling observation I made is the lack of guidance to help teachers and soon-to-be teachers understand how to structure small group reading instruction. To be clear, guided reading, a popular small group practice, is a prevalent practice throughout these texts, and it is perplexing that this universal custom lacks consistency. Authors of these texts present guided reading in ways that reflect their personal views of how reading should be taught, and unfortunately many of these views are not reflective of what we have learned about best practices in reading instruction, especially for our very young and struggling readers.
A New “Guided Reading”
Guided reading was originally designed to provide a comprehension focus. However, now, guided reading has become a small group catch-all wherein any reading skill, including ‘word work’ or decoding lessons are also taught.
Since the term guided reading is so universal in our schools, I propose that we redefine this small reading group practice to empower teachers to TEACH first then GUIDE our students to become proficient readers. The structures I propose incorporate the most effective overall teaching practices and those specific to reading instruction. Please download these two informative syntheses of the research on overall effective teaching practices and follow along with me on this journey as we design a small group structure that is easy to use and adapt to our students’ needs. Principles of Effective Instruction and Seven Strategies
The Small Group Structure
We will create a framework, which may be new to many of you, or remind you of lesson structures you have used in the past. A framework helps us be more efficient in our planning – we all need that! If you use a reading program, it probably provides a lesson framework for you, steps that you follow. If you do not have a program, this framework will be especially helpful for you. Either way, having a structure into which you plug your lessons parts will ensure that you teach systematically and explicitly. As you read through this framework, know that it is just that. It will be up to you to insert the content that is responsive to your students’ needs and plan your instruction for each part of the lesson in the framework.
The Small Group Lesson Framework
Our teacher lives are complex and demanding enough. Having a consistent framework helps simplify our planning, and meets a requirement of systematic instruction – a routine that fills teacher and student need for consistency. Try using this framework for planning whole group reading lessons too! You may not be teaching all of your students in small group, so use this framework to provide excellent TEACHING and GUIDING during your whole group lessons as well.
With a program, this framework will work. Insert the elements from your program, add additional practice activities.
Without a program – It will take a little extra work on your part, but you can do it! You need a skills sequence, words and reading materials that are matched to the target decoding elements. You will also need practice activities.
The STEPS Framework – Teach then Guide
Adapted from Next STEPS in Literacy Instruction, Smartt and Glaser. Brookes Publishing.
The framework works well for decoding lessons, but is adaptable to teaching other reading components as well.
S – Set up for Learning (The Warm-Up) 3-5 min
Begin your lesson with a review of a skill students have learned. This serves to prime the pump for learning something new. This step wakes up the brain for learning, motivating students through active involvement at a high rate of success.
Choose the skill you want to review and plan an active way to review it.
Warm-Up Ideas: (remember – use words and material students have learned in earlier lessons)
T – Teach (I Do – Teacher Voice is Dominant) 3-5 min
In this step the teacher explicitly teaches the new skill through explanation, modeling, showing and telling. Students will hear you say, “Today we will learn…” “Watch me. Listen.” “My turn.”
E – Engage (We Do – Teacher and Student voices together) 3-5 min
With your support, students engage with, and briefly practice the skill just taught to them. This gives the teacher an indication of whether the students need more instruction before the next lesson step.
P – Practice (You Do & We Do – Student voice with Teacher voice when needed for correction, praise, reteaching) 15-20 min
In this step, students practice the concept just taught multiple times. Teacher guides students to apply what they have learned, providing more instruction, corrective feedback, and specific praise.
Ideas: Students practice their skill with –
S – Show you Know (Assess learning) Quick 3-5 min
During this closing step, students are asked to demonstrate their learning. Teachers want to know, “Did the students master this skill?” Teachers keep data on student performance to help them plan future lessons.
Tips to make your small group instruction powerful!
Taught and guided… your small group lessons will become easier to plan and teach when you use a framework in which you TEACH and students PRACTICE (a lot!) the skills you teach.
This was truly helpful, especially including a video of a teacher demonstrating the spell boxes. Thank you
Annette says: Extremely helpful article. I did not have access to several of the live links though. atc_admin says:Ah, thank you for alerting us, Annette. I’ll work with the author to get these links functioning again.
April Malone says:I also was not able to open any of the direct links. Nevertheless, thanks for sharing! I have been searching for something to help in planning small, guided reading groups and this is it!
Rosaline Top says: great article, but would love to be able to access material in links Jeanie Neal says: Thank you, I enjoyed the article. I wasn’t able to open the live links. Lynn Stengel says: I need access to all the links. Andries says:Awesome Dr Glaser for empowering us. As for teach and guide, I strongly agree with you. The frame is also amazing. Thank you once more.
Andries
South Africa
About the Author: Deborah Glaser has had a passion for teaching reading for a very long time. Ever since her little sister needed some help reading, she has followed her dream to teach others to read. Deborah has taught reading as an elementary teacher, special education teacher, and dyslexia specialist. Over the past 20 years, Dr. Glaser has traveled around the nation providing professional development for teachers, consulting with schools, districts, and policy groups. Her desire for every teacher to have access to the knowledge they deserve to help them teach all students how to read distinguishes her as a leader in the field. Dr. Glaser is author and co-author of the LETRS© Modules, Foundations: An Introduction to Language and Literacy (L. Moats) and ParaReading: A Training Guide for Tutors. Other publications include Reading Fluency: Understanding and Teaching this Complex Skill (with Dr. Jan Hasbrouck) and Next STEPS in Literacy Instruction: Connecting Assessment to Effective Interventions (with Susan Smartt, PhD).
