Guided reading is an approach to reading instruction that aims to teach readers tools and strategies to read better on their own. Guided reading involves a small group, a shared text, and a teacher.

Guided Reading   Before Reading	During Reading	After Reading
Teacher reminds them what they have been talking about Teacher has students point to pictures Asks questions about pictures to activate more background knowledge and get students in the right mode of thought Teacher and students make prediction All read title out loud All go through book page by page discussing concepts Teacher asks questions about text Teacher asks questions about students’ feelings and experiences Teacher asks a lot of “What do you notice?” Connects pictures to text very deliberately, matching pictures to words Teacher uses text to practice phonemic awareness “Are there some other words that you know?” Students point to follow along Teacher explains how punctuation affects meaning	Students are going to read quietly to themselves Teacher models good reading behavior Teacher instructs students to re-read if they finish for more practice Teacher goes around to each quietly reading student and makes notes about the strategies they are using and their progress, helps them along if they are struggling Teacher is encouraging	Teacher goes over strategies the students used and reinforces phonemic awareness techniques Teacher reinforces comprehension strategies Word work—flashcards about terms students have been discussing, teacher shows pictures and students say the term Phonemic awareness exercise: “what sound does this word begin with?” , students match letters to onset sounds, then to final sounds (reviews silent e)

I really liked this video and appreciated the amount of time the teacher spent on pre-reading activities. I like that she kept the group centered and focused and made her expectations clear, especially by modeling each behavior before the students did it. I think guided reading is something I would want to make a big part of my reading instruction. It was cool to see how it worked in a lower-level setting like in this video. I wonder how it would be run for older students. The only thing I thought could be improved was allowing students more time to arrive to conclusions without prompting, giving students a bit more time to express themselves and to consider things. Question for myself: if this is something I value, how will I make it a priority in a super busy extra-packed day?

Reading A-Z seems like a cool website with a lot of good resources, although their membership is almost one hundred dollars a year.They seem to have a lot of good activities, graphic organizers, etc. and it's great how everything is divided and cross-referenced by the skill or subject you are looking to focus on. I hope someone put some of these things on Pinterest, is all I'm saying.

[I read "Identifying Instructional Moves During Guided Learning" by Frey & Fisher and "Every Child a Reader: What One Teacher Can Do" by Gary Su Pinnell.]

One of my favorite things was Frey & Fisher saying of asking questions to check understanding, "The intention of this question is an important one, as the existence of a punctuation mark alone does not qualify it for this category".

They said the most common type of questions asked was elicitation. While these questions are good to ask and important, certainly the other types of questions allow the student to demonstrate/foster a deeper understanding of material. The least frequently asked question types-- divergent, heuristic, and inventive-- could be used more often. How can teachers avoid falling into the trap of "just the facts" questions, especially when a lot of this has to be done on the fly? Having some go-to patterns of questions might help.

There is a lot of emphasis in both readings on having a set of techniques ready for different situations. I think that makes it somewhat less intimidating, knowing it's a set of habits I can make to become super-teacher. I wonder how some people come upon the theory they decide to stick with. How will I know when I've found my teaching philosophy soulmate?

I think this topic is the one that makes me most anxious. When it comes to actually becoming a teacher, I have no idea how to handle this. It is really good and interesting to read about the best practices, so I understand why multiple assessments are a good idea and, as Rubin says, “empowering”. But I’m still nervous about how to do all these different assessments at regular intervals and synthesize all the data I get into effective lessons for so many students. Rubin called it daunting and I totally agree.

This link has a lot of different ways to assess readers-- some for comprehension, some for read-out-loud abilities.

I enjoy reading about comprehension, and I think I really underestimated the complexity and nuance of the idea before.

One of the ideas that keeps resonating throughout the readings is how important it is to consider the reader when thinking about reading, and how the meaning one constructs is based so much on one’s background knowledge and past experiences. I was thinking about this the other day when I was trying to read something about history on Wikipedia. When I was checking things out about Western history, even though they were things I never knew before, it was easy for me to read and comprehend the text because I could visualize the place, there were some familiar names, and the general context the event took place in (say, during the Reformation or the Renaissance or something). When I tried to read something about Chinese history, however, I was completely lost. I understood the text, and the new words’ relations to each other, but I had no idea what to picture in the Qing versus Ming dynasty, none of the names were familiar to me, etc. That really made me appreciate the importance of pre-reading activities and a reader’s own personal history when thinking about comprehension.

Here are some during reading activities and questions in dice form. Thought it might be cool as a station activity?

For my real-life reading inquiry, I observed a second-grade classroom’s reading and writing lessons. These lessons started at the beginning of the school day and went on until lunch. During this observation I was particularly interested in learning about phonemic awareness in English Language Learner (ELL) students.

There were 18 students in the class, ten of whom did not have English as a first language, but only three who had special lessons (other students had graduated out of the program). The students were seated in groups of mixed achievement levels, so when working in small groups as happened several times in the lesson, they could help each other. The lower-level English speakers occasionally would look to a friend in class who would explain things if there was a misunderstanding-- sometimes in Spanish but sometimes not. This seemed to benefit all the students and create stronger peer relationships while also improving understanding.

There were some things in the classroom I really appreciated, and that seemed to jibe with the best practices illustrated in the readings, and some things that did not. I liked the seating arrangement of the class, in concentric horseshoes, the word wall (which children actually referred to several times during the lesson to check their spelling), and the way the lesson was structured. There was whole-group review and instruction, but then the children broke into small groups to complete activities at different stations around the room. The kids in the class seemed excited, upbeat, and consistently on task. The groups allowed the teacher to help students at one station (a writing response station), while the others worked independently. I loved this idea and would like to implement this stations idea in my classroom, because not only did it break the quite long lesson up into many separate, small tasks that better kept the students attention, but it gave the teacher a chance to work one-on-four with students and provide much more individualized assistance.

Unfortunately, the text they were working with was one of the main things I didn’t like. I doubt it was the teacher’s individual choice, but all the same it was pretty lacking. The basal reader they were using seemed appropriately challenging vocabulary-wise, and included good tasks for them, but the subject matter was dry and not relatable.

Right before lunch, the special teacher for the ELL students arrived. The three students (all girls) with the lowest language mastery joined her at a group of desks. Two of the girls spoke and understood some English.  They seemed to be doing well and their progress was comparable to each other. One of the girls, though, had just arrived in America and spoke absolutely no English. Given that, it was absolutely incredible how she could sight read new words. She picked up on new vowel and consonant patterns so fast. This made me feel not only in awe of her, but made me appreciate more how checking to see “if someone can read” is a way more complicated process than having them read aloud.

The three girls and their ESL instructor used their short lesson to learn a new phoneme— “oo”. They were introduced to the sound, then combined it with single consonants (“boo”, “zoo”, “too”) then in the middle of words (“moon”) and then with consonant blends (“bloom”).  It was really cool to see the girls be able to manipulate sounds so adeptly, and once they had a new pattern to recognize, they did really well with the reading aloud portion. I think this approach makes sense somewhat—in focusing on phonemic awareness for the ESL students rather than vocabulary (especially given the short time they had with the specialized instructor), it gives those students the tools they will need to learn vocabulary independently and incidentally. The only thing that I didn’t love about this portion was that the instructor used linguistic jargon with the kids. For instance, when one mistakenly voiced a “silent e,” she corrected by saying “remember, consonant e!” which was the kind of thing that, in my TESL class, we were strongly encouraged to avoid.

All in all, it was a wonderful experience and I’m even more excited to get into a classroom now. 

link
Above is a great list of sites with vocabulary activities.


One concept I thought was interesting in the readings this week was word consciousness. Encouraging a positive disposition towards words so that children will find learning new words intrinsically rewarding is such a huge part of creating a beneficial classroom culture. Especially given that a lot of vocabulary learning is incidental, it is important to give kids an impetus to ask or figure out what something means when they encounter a new word. This was mentioned in a couple of the articles, the idea that in addition to controlled vocabulary lessons, a teacher has to also make students capable of independent learning. It seems kind of obtuse but a lot of the strategies recommended were similar to those for teaching emergent readers to love reading-- in that case, creating a print-rich environment; in this case, creating an environment with a lot of chances to be exposed to new words.

Vocabulary was always one of my strong suits and I think one of the main reasons it came more easily to me is that the adults in my life never used baby words or talked down to me. That's probably my least favorite thing people do when interacting with children. I want to make a conscious effort not to do that, but sometimes it feels difficult because you still want to be understood clearly.

summarizing/synthesizing & determining importance presentation

This week I read an article called "Guided Reading: The Romance and the Reality" by Irene C. Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell. The full text is available here through UTK Libraries.

Their basic premise is to promote the use of guided reading to challenge students and continuously raise their comprehension levels while encouraging teachers to challenge themselves and continue their professional development.

The things Fountas and Pinnell like about guided reading:

• small group teaching allows for differentiation
• pairs students with texts on the edge of their ability level (not too easy or too hard)
• has teachers doing authentic assessments of student reading levels
• encourages greater variety of reading materials in a classroom

But Fountas and Pinnell offer some warnings. One, that teachers have been pushing students up to too high a level based on their performance in these activities, without looking at how much they truly understand. Two, that allowing student groups to become stagnant doesn't reflect how students are progressing.

"Teachers need to become expert in forming and reforming groups to allow for the differences in learning that are evident in students."

They encourage teachers to draw students into a deeper understanding of text, and to not rely too much on reading levels when it comes to choosing texts.

Fountas and Pinnell actually formed the popular A-Z leveling of books, but even they say it's not everything. A teacher has to consider things that might make a text more or less accessible and therefore understandable to students--it isn't simply a matter of what percentage of words they know. That really resonated with me, as a person who tried to read The Great Gatsby in fifth grade and comprehended approximately none of it. 

I enjoyed this article and thought a lot of the visuals were cool and helpful little charts, so I included some here.

The role of the teacher in reading comprehension is interesting to me. It made a lot of sense, but it was good to have it explained outright: that a teacher in a child's younger years has to give a much more complete scaffolding of how to extract meaning from language. The main thing I got from exploring this concept was just wonder at how children come into the world needing to learn EVERYTHING, even things that, to us as adults, seem so natural and obvious. Sorry if that's a bit esoteric, but I can't get over it. It is something to be cognizant of as we interact with young learners.

Two interesting measures of fluency in the readings this week were prosody and endurance.
I always thought of fluency as the traditional "speed and accuracy" measures, but when the concepts of prosody and endurance were explained, they made A LOT of sense.

Prosody  or lack thereof is what made student-lead read-alouds all throughout grade school so painful. No one is engaged by a robotic rendering of A Separate Peace. The students could "read fine" and they didn't struggle with the words or anything, but it was so flat, so rushed. And while, when reading myself, I find very theatrical performances to be super disingenuous, there is definitely a comfortable middle ground there, where one can convey the meaning of the words AND punctuation without feeling like a bad Laurence Olivier impersonater. Maybe I am just way too socially anxious. Anyway.

Here is a really cool tool I found. It's an iPad app that allows readers to try to match the waveforms of a teacher's reading of a passage. It was devised to help students with ASD sound more natural.

prosody app

Endurance was interesting to me because it's something that I don't think was ever assessed for me, but is still like, a skill I remember acquiring. When you can choose longer and longer books and it doesn't intimidate you. Two books can have the same level words, but the one with more pages, up until a certain point, will just seem like too much work. In foreign language classes even now, I can read a dialogue no problem, for instance, but if my teacher asked me to read a prose excerpt I think my eyes would just glaze over.

Making Words Set Up


The Making Words activity is a great idea for classrooms--it makes sense for beginning readers/spellers of course but I also really liked the Making Big Words idea, particularly the few minutes of "free play" that the activity begins with it. It's a structured activity but it allows creativity and a feeling of independent achievement. I think connections kids make themselves are better remembered. With older kids, it might be fun to do another manipulatives activity but with root words, prefixes and suffixes, maybe in groups.

This strategy bookmark might be a little contrived with the animal thing, but I liked it. I felt like it reflected what we've been reading this week--basically that there are more strategies out there for understanding words than just going letter-by-letter. We use a lot of these almost without thinking, when we encounter unfamiliar words, and we might forget that these are skills that can really be taught.

I'm taking a Farsi class right now, so it's a foreign language and a foreign alphabet for me. I am still not a fluent reader, and already I find myself using these strategies. Sometimes it feels like that means I'm kind of "faking it"--but if it helps me decode, then hey. I find myself recognizing high-frequency words without really "seeing" the individual letters. Things like that.

Here is a wonderful video I found about prefixes. It is a rap. It's completely ridiculous but maybe you'll like it, too.

For me, it's kind of hard to remember how exactly I learned literacy skills in English, but I find a lot of this stuff makes sense when I think about struggles I've had with other languages. Do any of your foreign language learning experiences come to mind when reading about these strategies?  

One of the suggestions we saw this week was using real everyday objects as tools for learning phonemes. Phonemic awareness has been stressed as being one of the most important keys to functional literacy. Something kind of bothered me about it though...do we really want M for Marcus to be inextricably linked to McDonald's?
This is something I've been thinking about a lot. I loved the idea of using authentic materials and showing how print-rich the world around them really is, but for some reason, the idea of teaching kindergartners letters through commercial packaging rubbed me the wrong way. Advertising is already such a huge part of kids' lives, do I really want to promote that? Then again, will I have a choice? A lot of schools are already sponsored by soda companies and the like.
I want to get off my high horse and do what is most effective and most relevant for students, but I think I would feel better if we talked about this.

Something to consider: kids' reactions to branding can be pretty adorable...

phonics hockey
The family culture of literacy in the Jones family emphasized how important literacy was in everyday life and in fostering close relationships. Since not every child is lucky enough to live in a home where reading is important, how can we create a culture of literacy in the classroom?

The article and the textbook both talked about how children with a lot of prior literacy exposure come to school excited to learn how to read: they know why it's important, all the things in the "real world" it will help them to understand. I love the idea of bringing in menus, shopping lists and magazines. One of the most exciting things about learning to read, for me, was the idea that I could finally start to decode all the grown-up stuff I was surrounded by. What kind of real world materials would you like in your classroom?





The link above is a cool idea for a kinesthetic game to get kids more familiar with phonemes; check it out!

We can see specific techniques that make teachers more effective, yet these are not supported by administrators or by public policy. What children need to perform better and to become better learners is excellent teachers, but what does that really mean?
The question raised is, what is expected from an individual teacher? How much of one's own money should be spent? How hard is one expected to fight for the desired changes in curriculum?

We want excellent educators. We want teachers to be deserving of and demanding respect. But with this emphasis on individuals overcoming institutional obstacles, are we just continuing the narrative of "exceptional individuals" that the American school system has perpetuated? Much as we need to help students that struggle with material, we need to help teachers who, according to the text, "don't know what to do." Professional development should be a priority.