Is teaching reading by ability grouping students a thing of the past. I ask this because I have taught math for 20 years and am “out of the loop” in current reading strategies! We have a small 1st grade class with 2 students who are reading at 2nd to early 3rd grade levels. We also have 3 students who are barely at the mid -kindergarten level. These kids are all expected to read and do the SAME work on a daily basis. The teacher refuses to slow down for the 3 that are struggling and she will not group them and let them work at their level. She says grouping went out with the dark ages! Am I off base by thinking that working with the 3 struggling students at a slower pace on their instructional level is an old fashioned idea? There are only 10 children in the class—so the teacher should have time to do this. Any comments?
Your Instincts Are Right
Deb, you’re right. As far as reading skills acquisition is concerned, they should be reading at their own level. Frankly, it should be as one-on-one as the teacher can manage. No two people learn to read at exactly the same pace and the grouping should only be caused by classroom time and management constraints. This is only true at the decoding level however.
There’s the other, equally important area of reading for comprehension purposes. Literature groups, even for first graders, can include all ability levels. The important skill here is how to respond to what’s read, not the mechanics of decoding. This is where we hope to create children who love books, love to talk about them, share their thoughts and respond to those of others. The Great Books Series would be one example. Most first graders would need someone to read the story aloud but they all can respond. It gives the slower readers a chance to shine in the realm of literacy because what we care the most about is how they respond to the stories.
Re: I have a question about 1st grade reading
This yet another of those swinging pendulums. Now grouping is out of style, even when it might be useful. When I was teaching twenty-five years ago, grouping was the twelfth commandment (the eleventh is “thou shalt write all numbers in pencil forever whether it makes sense or not”)
I saw the down-side of grouping. All the things I am saying here were pretty much standard in four or five elementary schools which I either worked in or had close contact with as a tutor and parent.
Every class had to have three groups, period. I was severely criticized and marked down as a teacher for not doing this. Although officially group membership was flexible, in practice it was cast in stone; if you were in the slow group in the first month of Grade 1 you were 90% guaranteed to be in the slow group all the way through elementary school, to be in basic level classes in high school, and to get a dead-end high school certificate not good enough to enter any further training, with a fifth-grade (at best) reading level. In the case of students entering school from another language or ethnic base, the prejudice was reinforced by the grouping system.
While the teacher was teaching Group A, Groups B and C were supposed to be doing “seatwork”. If you give *only* twenty minutes to each group, it takes you a full hour plus ten to fifteen minutes for organization of that seatwork. And each child gets (officially) only twenty minutes of teaching, but he has to sit and work quietly with no help or supervision for forty minutes. Personally I have never seen any primary-school kid at any learning level who can sit still and quiet and do productive learning work for forty minutes, and of course if you really have ADD, forget it; this time turns into daydreaming and doodling with very little learning going on for all students at all levels. Kids do one workbook page per day each, an amount of work that could be done in five to ten minutes ordinarily; they are trained into dawdling and dozing.
Also, let’s face it, it’s more fun and rewarding to teach those fast kids, and they have so many stories to tell and questions to answer. And that slow group answers questions like pulling teeth and it’s hard to keep them on task for the full lesson. In practice the twenty minutes for each group easily slides to forty minutes for the fast group and ten minutes for the others. (I saw exactly this happen in a model demonstration class - I was clocking it and watching student activities for interest - and if this is the top model class, what about the less model teachers?)
All this is not to say that informal sub-grouping and working individually with those three kids is a bad idea; quite the contrary. Just that the rigid three groups and so forth is as dated and ineffective as the Dick and Jane books that come from the same era.
When I had Grades 1 and 2 in one class, I taught phonics to everyone (they all need it), had one grade work *at their own pace* in reading comprehension workbooks while the other grade read out loud, and had everyone read quietly (not absolutely silently at this stage) for half an hour every afternoon, during which time I sat down with the strugglers and helped them along. Interestingly, a group of strugglers from both grades chose to sit together and read together, so it was easy to help them without singling them out. One student was struggling even more and luckily an excellent after-school tutor/teacher volunteered to help him. The combination of phonics, working where they were in comprehension, daily oral reading, and additional reading daily at therir own level worked wonders — just about every child achieved above standard expectations. Even the one with the most difficulty ended the year as a reader, a notable success for that student.
Unfortunately, all of this was not what people were used to and I was constantly accused of doing things *wrong* — ie not exactly like Miss Smith last year. But if you can get people to try somkething different …
It is not in vogue as much anymore but it is still of great value. The low readers need to spend time in learning the alphabetic principle, phonemic awareness and learning to read in a small group but they should be spiraled out into the faster reading group as soon as they have the skills to read.. They can have the material read to them that the other kids are reading to keep up with the class. What about Read Naturally for these kids to help them with reading fluency along with the decoding?