A few months ago, we posed this question on our blog:
Why is small group instruction important for accelerating literacy skills for older students?
Since then, we’ve had many educators reach out to ask us to dive in deeper to the “how” of small group instruction for middle and high school. Here is a step-by-step guide to implementing small group instruction for older striving readers.
Step One: Assess students to determine their needs. This is sometimes referred to as a diagnostic assessment, where students’ skill gaps, as well as their strengths, are itemized, making it easy to differentiate based on them.
- Note: iReady and even NWEA MAP do this to a certain extent since they're both adaptive assessments that give a quick recap of phonics skills. However, they usually indicate that a student needs a secondary screener (like WIST or DIBELS) that focuses just on phonics.
- Check out this blog post on literacy assessments for older students.
Step Two: Group students according to their needs. Depending on the lesson objective, you can also use this as an opportunity to further accelerate students by grouping them according to their strengths.
- Here are some examples of how you might organize and plan for your groups:
- Decoding: group students by phonics skill level, and use decodable texts to teach and reinforce phonics skills
- Fluency: provide time for repeated reading with high-low books
- Comprehension: Use Visual Thinking Strategies to analyze a text that you read aloud to the group, or provide students with high-low or decodable books at their reading level
Step Three: Plan whole-group literacy lessons, identifying opportunities for small chunks of small group instruction. Or plan for small group instruction during whole-class strategic independent reading time.
- Here’s an example of how we might differentiate a whole-group literacy lesson:
- Before reading, activate background knowledge by creating a digital KWL chart
- Model Book-Head-Heart as a comprehension strategy
- Read aloud grade-level content to the whole class
- Create small groups based on skill to dig into the content. One group might be re-reading for fluency, another might be creating a written response, another group can re-read for a comprehension discussion, and another group will be working with you to re-read the text (re-written at their reading level) to work on decoding skills.
Step Four: Teach small group lessons, focusing on getting to know the students in the small groups as readers. Include some time for specific direct instruction connected to the skills you grouped students based on, followed by lots of practice and time for feedback.
- I Do: Specific direct instruction (lesson plan example)
- We Do: Select a text based on the skill you are working on with that group (multisyllabic words example text)
- Time for practice (student activity example)
- Feedback example (example)
Step Five: Reassess to gauge progress and regroup accordingly.
- Assessments we’ve found helpful: MAP, iReady, DIBELS, WIST
- Which assessments do you like to use with your students?
Want to discuss how to use Storyshares decodable chapter books in small group settings with older students? Reach out to us at info@storyshares.org, or learn more about our decodable books for older readers here.