From reading different blogs and seeing “guided reading” products on Pinterest and TPT, it became apparent to me that there are MANY different interpretations of what guided reading is out in the education world. From being trained as a literacy coordinator at Lesley University, following the Literacy Collaborative framework, my interpretation of guided reading is homogeneous groups of students reading books at their instructional reading level with teacher-supported text introductions and a facilitated discussion of the text once the text has been read independently by the students in a group. The goal of guided reading is to work with students at their instructional reading level in groups of students with similar reading abilities to them in order to advance their reading skills. In order to have productive guided reading groups, all students need to be tested at the beginning, middle, and end of the year using the Benchmark Assessment, so that teachers are able to use current reading levels when forming groups.
At my school, Rice Lake Middle School, we have benchmarked all of our students in grades 5-8. I am currently team teaching 6th grade Language Arts along with being the literacy coach for the school. It’s an interesting perspective because I can see what it takes to implement guided reading at the individual classroom level in 6th grade, and I also see the big picture of what needed to be done from the literacy coach end in order to get it going for the whole school. (Interested in learning more about Guided Reading? Check out my Guided Reading Resources!)
From the literacy coach end, we created a book room for all the Language Arts teachers at the middle school to use. The book room is leveled I-Z using the Fountas and Pinnell leveling system. Since our school has no extra space, we also had to get very creative with where our book room was going to be. We eventually settled for knocking a wall out between two closets to create our current book room and had a local builder come in and build custom shelves to fit the space. A few of my colleagues and I spent countless hours this summer arranging and leveling all of the books. It was quite the undertaking, but the final product was more than worth it, as you can see below. The two pictures below the final product show the sorting and leveling we had to do before getting to the final product.
Once we had the book room in place for our middle school, the next step was to figure out how we would get all of our students through the benchmark assessment. The Language Arts teachers really stepped up to the plate with this, each benchmarking all 50-75 of their students. Once this was completed, the true fun of beginning guided reading began. At the sixth grade level, we figured out how to use our block schedule in order to create homogenous groups so that each of us would meet with our below grade level readers at least 3 times a week, our at grade level readers 2 times a week, and our above grade level readers 1 time per week. We are all excited to begin.
