Conferring and Small Group Strategy Instruction
Conferring and Small Group Work:
While students are engaged in independent/partner reading time, the teacher will conference with individual students or a small group of students, to provide differentiated instruction and support. These opportunities during the workshop are highly valued by both students and teachers because of the personalized experiences.
Structures for Conferring and Small Group Work
1:1 Conferring:
Teachers often confer with students individually about their reading to address specific needs and goals. These may include decoding skills and comprehension strategies. One-to-one conferencing is an effective way to personalize instruction and meet the needs of individual students. Six important steps for a reading conference include:
Get students talking about their reading or listen in while a student reads aloud;
Compliment the reader about something they do well;
Identify the teaching point;
Model skill or strategy;
Give student opportunity to practice while teacher coaches in;
Link to independent reading work.
1:1 Conferring: Assessment-based response teaching
Small Strategy group:
Strategy lessons are brief heterogeneously, or homogeneously, based groups that focus on a specific skill or behavior. Strategy groups help readers move forward on a learning progression towards individual reading goals. Groups can be formed to either solidify a skill, offer remediation, or expose readers to a new genre. Instructional level small groups can be held with varying levels of support, from the most heavily scaffolded (guided reading) to lightly scaffolded (series or level introduction).
The gradual release of responsibility in small group instruction helps to build independent readers. Strategies sessions can be either single session or a planned series with the same group of students.
Small group phonics lessons:
Small group phonics lessons should be taught during reading and writing workshops. These groups help to support the transference of skills taught during phonics time into independent reading and writing, and they also allow individualized support based on assessment data. Small group instruction is an effective way to support your student’s phonics learning and to offer opportunities for transference in the reading and writing workshops.
Guided Reading:
Guided reading is one type of small group strategy which scaffolds instruction to help students progress. The goal of guided reading is to teach students the skills and strategies needed to move across the gradient of text levels. A common text is used to explicitly teach an identified skill or set of skills.
There is a gradual release of scaffolding as students demonstrate the behaviors and competencies necessary to read at their instructional level. Students are homogeneously grouped, based on their current reading levels. Through specific and personalized goal-based lessons, guided reading is an opportunity for students to be exposed to a variety of genres while being given direct instruction in decoding, fluency, comprehension and vocabulary acquisition.
The following table applies to all Structures for Conferring and Small Group Work
Teacher’s Role*
Compliment readers based on teaching points
Plan instruction/conferences using data and observation
Record student behavior and document skills taught
Work with an individual, or a group needing similar instruction
Assess student progress
Student’s Role*
Participate and practice skills being taught
Participate in guided instruction
Transfer skills taught to independent work
Conferring Prompts and Recording Sheets
Copy of record keeping tools.docx