guided reading

“Guided Reading” is certainly one of the recent educational buzz words. It was the mantra of the Reading Department Head of the university I attended.

What the folks who came up with this term *don’t* give a teacher are a scope & sequence, multisensory techniques, and other explicit instructional methods to enable them to guide kids into some lexical knowledge.

What are you using? Big Books? Basals? How are you connecting the readers to sounds of letters? Or are you using exclusively whole word techniques?

I have just a posted amessage elsewhere about Literacy Blocks—guided and shared reading. My school is venturing into the model and I have some concerns that the LD kids and others may spend their time doing many “busy activities”.

Do you withdraw your LD kids during this time or are they catered for and then perhaps withdrawn later? Is this a model that can be adapted to the Special Education Department.

I would appreciate views of those already involved—pros and cons. Also hints about how to introduce some best practice.

Ellie

As a reading specialist and special education teacher, I have done a “push-in” model with younger-age children where the reg-ed teacher is doing one small group while I’m doing another, struggling group. As children get to be in 3rd-4th grade, they begin to be self-conscious about being in the regular classroom and working on skills that are way behind their non-disabled peers. I base pull-out on two factors: 1) Student attitude toward being in the classroom and 2) Where best instruction can best occur.

The last point would include such things as need for less distraction, type of group, length of group sessions, how distracting *we* are to other classroom learners.

So, if it fits in the classroom, leave it there. If it doesn’t, then move it out.

I’m not sure what you mean by busy work in Guided Reading. Could you explain more. It’s so open, the model can mean lots of things to lots of people.

Hello Sara,

Guided reading is a very old term that used to mean working with a small group of students, guiding their reading through a story, generally in those days with a basal. Pretty much the old Directed Reading Teaching Activity (DRTA). More recently Fountas and Pinnell called their system Guided Reading too, which is confusing. Their system includes the use of books leveled by their criteria. And then there are teachers who are using neither of these or a combination. Could you explain what you mean when you say guided reading?

Thanks for the response.

The “busy activities” that I refer to are those that I witnessed in many classrooms. The sheet, color, cut and glue type activities. They keep the children very busy, but in terms of being a reading activity they are sometimes lacking in content. Speaking to some teachers they are concerned how to spend time with the small group they are working with and to keep the other students engaged in some sort of activity.

I think we all have had a bank of such activities that we use on our “off days” ,but I fear that there is a danger of them becoming a major component f literacy block activities.

Ellie

Thanks for clarifying. The bottom line, you use guided reading techniques when you take a small group of youngsters through a story. Guided reading has also been known as: a Directed Reading Activity (I believe ala Gray), then the model was modified to the Directed Reading-Thinking Activity. The Reading Recovery folks called it “guided reading.”

In addition to preparing the student for reading with questioning and vocabulary development, it includes the questioning that goes on throughout the reading intended to guide the development of comprehension.

Pretty much any good comprehension development techniques, questioning, “thinking aloud,” etc. can be incorporated into guided reading.

Where is guided reading of little utility? Probably in the early stages of reading tightly controlled readers where the students read text to like: “Can Dan fan pan?” There is little to comprehend here. However, when the students achieve 2-3 grade reading levels and basic decoding has been taught, let’s say the different syllable types, and students are blending syllables into two syllable words and they know most high frequency “red” words, then the stories have enough vocabulary to access to be more meaningful and comprehension activities take their rightful place in the forefront of reading, along with developing fluency and automaticity.

Guided reading is an appropriate tool that can be applied to most reading situations. Guided reading techniques can be applied to read aloud situations where you wish to develop listening comprehension skills in a larger group setting.

This takes some classroom procedures training and no-nonsense management, but establishing centers is excellent. Here’s an example in a sped room and one in the regular classroom:

Sped—

16-20 Students can be split into 4-5 groups of 4-5. While I am doing small group reading with one group, another group is on computers using reading skills software to reinforce previously taught skills (I never let computers *teach* for me—only practice with students). The third group is doing Silent Sustained Reading of a book at their level. Another group is at the listening center listening to the book their classroom is reading (I have a tape-recording set that allows 6 students to listen to the same story), and the final group is responding to their reading(s) in the writing center.

Reg Ed—

Same exact principle, but a little more flexibility. Students might be at the science center doing observations, writing about an experiment, or whatever else (besides worksheets) has been placed there for them.
Sometimes, in regular classroom, I have higher-level students buddy read with lower level ones—not highest group, but one just above or below the one with which they are paired.

Whatever they are doing, it must be independent and the classroom climate must be carefully crafted to avoid teasing. What I am doing with the small group is critical (the details of “what” is a whole different email). I don’t follow someone’s “squares” for my lesson plans. I have carefully decided how to structure my groups and am teaching skills and using teaching concepts that are usually different for each group—based on the needs of the learners in that group.

Students change activities after thirty minutes. The procedures to make this work take a lot of teacher-led practice.

Here is how I do guided reading in my middle school sped classroom. I teach a lesson to all students. Lets say it is cause and effect. I model with a text and we do examples together with a short text that I read. We practice together until everyone can understand the skill. Then, students use a text at their level to find an example of cause and effect. I either meet with a small group of students or they work with a partner or a small group and I move from group to group. Everyone is working on the same skill but the text is different. We come back together and everyone shares their example of cause and effect. The students discuss and we chart the examples. This way everyone is engaged and on task 100% of the time. There is no busy work. I can pull a group to work more intently as needed. These groups are flexible and change from skill to skill. My kids make phenomenal progress because they spend their time reading not coloring or doing other busy work. It takes some work to find meaningful text for all students but it is well worth the effort.

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This question seemed unclear to me when I first read it, so I didn’t jump in; looking at the variety of responses, many of which seem to be about comprehension work in the upper elementary, nothing to do with your question regarding kindergarten, it seems it was unclear to the others here as well.
What exactly are you doing when you say you have a group in “guided reading”? Do you have a group sitting with you reading a book orally in turns, which is what I do as “guided reading?” Do you have a group sitting with you looking at pictures and answering your questions? Do you have a bunch of kids picking out their own library books and each thumbing through a different one, as is suggested by some other posters? Each of these is a diffferent question requiring a different response. We’d all be more than happy to talk if we understood better what you wanted!
Then, we seem to have some new education jargon that I haven’t met yet. What do you mean by “teach-to’s”? I get the feeling that you are trying to respond to your students’ needs and to give a mini-lesson about some issue that comes up in the reading — is this what you mean? And are you unhappy that the students don’t seem to be mastering whatever skills you’ve addressed, but are always showing the same needs over and over? Many of us here have many answers to these points, and if you’ll just tell us what the issues are, we’d be only too glad to talk things over.

Would *we* all be happy to discuss? Do many of *us* have answers? I believe you must speak for yourself.

Well, excuse me for being open to other people’s ideas.

Having read here for a while and participated for a while longer, I noticed that lots of people cropped up with lots of good suggestions and replies to most questions. Not presuming to have all the answers to all the questions, I try to make it clear that I’m just one voice of many here. If the poster asks again, no doubt many of these good people will add their voices, so why should I say that I have the complete and only answer?

And at least I do have the guts to post my opinions, popular or not, under my own name and email.

I am sick of people who use fake names to offend others. It is just so passive aggressive. Use your real nick, please.

Deeply offended but using my real nick to say so.

Why is the original writer, Sara, not included in “we”? How do we decide who is “we” and who is “them”? If a person is not a “we” then they must be a “them.” It has the ring of included and not-included.

I have as much right to post under a pseudonym as you do under your real name. There is nothing in this to offend, unless the questions make you uncomfortable. The burden of our own pompous errors can be a heavy and uncomfortable load. I include myself in this statement of “our”…

Let’s try to stay on topic, please.

Jessica
Forum Moderator

Sara asks a question; she is the questioner, and all the readers are “we” the possible answerers. The dichotomy exists in the posing of question and potential answer; it is unavoidable.
If you get offended about this, then why are you on a question-answer board to begin with? There are lots of other boards where you can go and complain that everyone else is not up to your standards, which are so high that you won’t even admit to them under your own name.

Yes, I do have a right to be insulted by your anonymous posting. Some people post here anonymously to protect their employment, and that is reasonable, especially as they are usually posting personal experience or opinions of events in their own careers. But if you are going to challenge another person, it is only common courtesy to do it under your own name. Cowards insult others and then hide. Anonymous accusations can do a lot of harm — read your history — and are considered to be bad taste and in some cases illegal slander/libel.