Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell created an A-through-Z leveling system by examining and identifying the (many) characteristics of text that impact its difficulty. So guided reading must be in small, flexible groups and the instructional focus must be based on student needs. Guided reading instruction must match the needs of the learner. And in order to know that a student has reached that level, the teacher must monitor student progress on an ongoing basis. A teacher moves a student out of a group as soon as there is sufficient evidence that a student's reading behaviors are appropriate, her word accuracy shows mastery and her comprehension is sufficient. Guided reading must occur in flexible groups. Small-group instruction on its own is not enough.ĭouglas Fisher, Nancy Frey and John Hattie have explained in Visible Learning for Literacy, Grades K-12: Implementing the Practices That Work Best to Accelerate Student Learning (2016) that small-group learning has been shown to accelerate student learning, if two conditions are met:

Unfortunately, students often stayed in the groups to which they were assigned, year after year.

Usually, there was a low group, a high group, and a few middle groups. I was with the same students in second grade, in third grade, and… well, you get the picture. Think about it this way: Back when I was in elementary school, I was in the “blue” reading group. How do we know that small-group instruction is not always guided reading? Let’s dig in to these important components of guided reading. Jan Richardson, in The Next Step Forward in Guided Reading: An Assess-Decide-Guide Framework for Supporting Every Reader (2016), offers three essentials of guided reading: Just what should we expect to see in a guided reading lesson? Experts agree that small groups and leveled texts are necessary, and there is also consensus that teaching must be targeted and include progress monitoring. By focusing instruction on these areas, a guided reading lesson prepares students to be able to read the next level of text complexity.

Therefore, a guided reading teacher plans lessons and focuses instruction on the areas where students need support. A guided reading teacher plays the role of an expert reader who scaffolds-and, yes, guides-the lesson for less-experienced readers. In guided reading, the goal is to build independent readers who can read fluently with comprehension. But does that term mean the same thing to everyone? Some teachers, any time they meet and read with small groups, call it guided reading regardless of the text they use, or the instructional focus of the lesson.Īt Scholastic, we believe that teaching reading in small groups is just one part of the instructional practice known as guided reading. It’s not unusual to hear the term guided reading used to describe small-group instruction.

The next step forward guided reading