GR K-5

What is Guided Reading?

During guided reading, students in a small -group setting individually read a text that you have selected. You provide teaching across the lesson to support students in building in-the-head networks of strategic actions for processing increasingly challenging texts.

What Guided Reading Looks Like

A small group of students who are at a similar point in their reading development are seated across from you at a small table. Each student reads, softly or silently, the same text individually. Guide a discussion of the text meaning and make teaching points based on your observations of the students' reading strengths and needs.

Why Guided Reading is Important

As an instructional context, guided reading:

▸Supports readers in expanding their processing competencies (in-the-head systems of strategic actions)

▸Provides a context for responsive teaching

▸Allows students to engage with a rich variety of texts

▸Helps students learn to think like proficient readers

▸Enables students to read more challenging texts with support

Planning for Guided Reading

▸Organize multiple copies of books by level e.g., behind the small-group table or in a school book room. These books are for teacher choice to use in instruction.

▸Identify each student's instructional level and form (or re-form) groups of readers who are at a similar point in their development of reading processes.

▸Select and analyze a text to determine challenges and learning opportunities.

▸Plan an introduction to the text to set readers up for effective problem solving.

Assessment and Record Keeping

Begin the year with a benchmark assessment to form groups and to know where to begin teaching. Establish a system for coding, scoring, and analyzing a reading record for each student on a regular basis. Students who are gaining control of effective processing more slowly will need more frequent monitoring through the use of more frequent reading records.

Daily observations and the data from your continuous assessments reveal how individual students are responding to your instruction and enable you to form and re-form groups for high-impact instruction. Use the benchmark assessment again as an interval assessment at the end of the year to document progress.

Structure of a Guided Reading Lesson

▸Introduce the text – Provide support to enable proficient reading of the new text, while also leaving some problem-solving to do.

▸Support students' reading of the text – Observe students' reading behaviors. Intervene very briefly if needed to teach for, prompt, or reinforce each reader's problem-solving actions.

▸Guide discussion of the text – Encourage students' expression of thinking with talk grounded in the text. Observe for evidence of students' thinking within, beyond, and about the text.

▸Engage in generative teaching – Provide specific teaching that is appropriate for the group based on your observations of the reading and talk about the text. Direct students' attention to strategic actions they can apply not only to this text but to other texts they read.

▸Engage students in letter and word work – Teach to increase rapid word-analysis skills and flexibility in word solving.

▸Extend understanding through writing (optional) – Prompt students to draw and/or write about reading. Encourage expression of thinking within, beyond, and about the text.