When small group reading instruction is mentioned two instructional contexts immediately come to mind: guided reading and literature circles. Chances are you have tried or used guided reading and/or literature circles in your classroom. Today, however, I am going to explore a third instructional context for small group reading instruction that is not as widely known and implemented by teachers. This format is reading strategy groups.
I’m going to start by giving a quick rundown of guided reading, literature circles, and reading strategy groups to illustrate the differences between these three structures for small group reading instruction. Please keep in mind that the definitions I provide for these instructional contexts are how I have used them in my middle school classroom and understand them to be. You may have a slightly different working definition depending on your understandings, learning, and experiences.
Guided Reading: Students are grouped in homogeneous groupings with students at a similar reading level, and the teacher assigns a text near that reading level to each group. When the group meets each week, the teacher is the facilitator of the conversation and prepares within, beyond, and about the text questions for the group to discuss. Additionally, the teacher provides a text introduction at the beginning of the book or text to introduce the overall ideas and structure and subsequence text introductions to introduce the section of the book or text students are reading for the week.
Literature Circles: Students are grouped in heterogeneous groupings, so students within one group will have varying reading levels. The teacher picks a theme or genre for a literature circle and introduces 4-6 texts/books to students. Students rank their top choices of what they’d like to read, and the teacher matches students with texts and creates the groupings based on this student feedback. When students meet weekly to discuss their book/text, the teacher is present in the group as an observer role, and the students are responsible for bringing discussion questions and facilitating their conversation.
So what exactly are reading strategy groups, and how do you differentiate reading strategy groups from guided reading and literature circles? When, as a middle school ELA teacher, should you use reading strategy groups? How should you format, prepare for, and assess reading strategy groups? What are the benefits of using reading strategy groups? I will be exploring all of these questions below.
What are reading strategy groups?
For reading strategy groups, students are placed into heterogeneous groupings (not by reading level). The teacher picks a theme or genre for reading strategy groups and introduces 4-6 texts/books to students. Students rank their top choices of what they’d like to read, and the teacher matches students with texts and creates the groupings based on this student feedback. When students meet weekly to discuss their book/text, the teacher facilitates a conversation with each book group around a specific reading strategy and how the group can apply that reading strategy to their book/text. The reading strategy can relate directly to the reading minilesson of the day or come from a previous reading strategy that the teacher feels would help a specific group. Each reading strategy group would be exposed to 4-5 different reading strategies across a 4-5 week period, meeting weekly with their teacher. The teacher may cover the same or different reading strategies with the different reading groups depending on the group’s needs and what reading strategies are most applicable to their book/text.
When should I use reading strategy groups? How often should I use reading strategy groups?
I love to do reading strategy groups with students during the first reading unit of the school year. Teaching and reinforcing reading strategies is a great time investment for the beginning of the school year because it can build a strong reading foundation for the remainder of the school year. Plus, reading strategy groups are heterogenous grouping based off of students’ reading interests and don’t require a ton of teacher prep in addition to the already-prepared reading minilesson for the day. As far as how often to use reading strategy groups across the school year, my recommendation would be to alternate instructional contexts and pick one instructional context for each reading unit (approximately 4-5 weeks of instruction) that you do. For example, if I do 7 reading units across the school year, I would plan out the instructional contexts that I was going to match the reading units with.
Reading Unit 1: Reading Strategy Groups
Reading Unit 2: Guided Reading
Reading Unit 3: Literature Circles
Reading Unit 4: 1-on-1 Reading Conferences
Reading Unit 5: Reading Strategy Groups
Reading Unit 6: Guided Reading
Reading Unit 7: Literature Circles
How should I format reading strategy groups?
I recommend formatting reading strategy groups using the structure I have created below. This structure has worked well at the middle school level for me with reading strategy groups. Another bonus of reading strategy groups is they don’t have to take up a huge chunk of time. If you have as little as 10 minutes, you can still squeeze one in, but they’re more likely to last around 15-20 minutes.
How should I prepare for reading strategy groups?
Start by setting a calendar so that you meet with each of your 4-5 book groups one time per week for 4-5 weeks. In order to prepare for a reading strategy group meeting, you need to decide what reading strategy you’re going to teach, discuss, and prompt the group about. As you’re starting out, I recommend keeping it fairly simple and using the reading minilesson of the day to reinforce the reading strategy. I’ll give an example below.
Reading Minilesson Statement: Readers think about internal and external problems in the story and how they connect with one another.
Reading Strategy: Thinking about how internal and external problems connect
Prompts to use with Reading Strategy Group: Once you get to the “Prompt and Teach for Reading Strategies” part of the Reading Strategy Group Structure pictured above, have a few prompts prepared to generate conversation and teaching within the group. Below are examples I would use to prompt for the reading strategy listed above.
- What are the main internal conflicts that the main character of your book faces?
- What are the main external conflicts that the main character of your book faces?
- How do an internal conflict and external conflict that the main character faces connect with one another?
- How did one conflict in your book directly lead to another conflict?
- What is a flaw that the main character has that has led to a conflict with another character?
- How does the main character’s society impact an internal conflict that he/she faces?
Preparing prompts that relate back to the reading strategy/reading minilesson of the day and following the Reading Strategy Group Structure is all you really have to do to be prepared to facilitate the small group of students.
How should I assess reading strategy groups?
It’s not necessary to assess reading strategy groups at all or every single time a group meets. Reading strategy groups, however, lend themselves well to assessing Speaking & Listening Standard 1 from the Common Core State Standards. The standards based grading rubric that I have created (that can easily be used in a points-based, traditional grading system as well) assesses students based on coming to discussion prepared, following agreed upon norms, and asking/answering questions to create a rich discussion of the text.
Want Reading Strategy Group Lessons prepped for you and aligned to the reading minilessons you’re using?
In my 6-8 Reading Workshop Year-Long Curriculum, each of the 7 reading units contains 20 reading minilessons specific to the genre of that reading unit. Each minilesson contains 5-6 prompts that can be used directly in Reading Strategy Groups or 1-on-1 reading conferences.
Additionally, the reading units contain other Reading Strategy Group resources such as:
- Book/Text Choice Sheet for students to fill out at the beginning of the reading unit to help with groupings
- The Reading Strategy Group Structure
- Calendar Template for planning when to meet with each group
- Reading Strategy Group Rubric to use to assess students during the meeting
- Student Bookmark to organize dates and page numbers students should read to.
- 5-6 prompts aligned to each of the 20 reading minilessons in each of the 7 reading units (That’s over 700 different reading question prompts to use with students!)
I think you’ll love the simplicity in teacher prep and the reward in students’ learning from Reading Strategy Groups. Give them a try this school year!
~Kasey
