Teaching Reading in Small Groups

For teachers who sometimes feel as if data-based instruction, differentiated groupings, and formative assessments somehow involve going over to The Dark Side, this book is a powerful antidote. It will help you know that you can hold tight to your deepest beliefs about children and literature, classrooms communities, and good teaching. Lucy Calkins
Author of Units of Study for Teaching Reading

In Teaching Reading in Small Groups, Jennifer Serravallo extends the powerful teaching that made Conferring with Readers a hit and helps you meet instructional challenges effectively and efficiently.

Jen shows how small groups help you uncover hidden time in your teaching for meeting individual students’ needs. You’ll work more closely with more children each day with her how-tos on:

• using formative assessment to create groups of readers with common needs
• differentiating for individuals, even when they’re in a group
• enhancing your Tier 1 and Tier 2 instruction.

You’ll see how Jen captures the strength of individual conference while working with multiple students—even if they aren’t reading the same book. For comprehension, fluency, engagement, print work strategies, and comprehension, she shares ideas for assessment and flexible grouping structures as well as her own teaching language. You’ll help readers:

• get into texts and get more out of them
• learn vital strategies that help them read more challenging texts
• talk about books with rigor and vigor.

"When we supplement individual conferences with small-group conferences," writes Jennifer Serravallo, "we work more efficiently and can deal well with higher benchmarks, larger class sizes, and the increasing demands placed on readers and teachers." Trust a master teacher and read Teaching Reading in Small Groups to find out how small groups can make a big difference in your classroom.

1. Beyond Reading Groups, Beyond Guided Reading
2. Forming Groups: Making the Invisible Visible Through Assessment
3. Without Engagement, We’ve Got Nothing: Helping Children Want to Read
4. Guided Practice Toward Independence: Strategy Lessons for Comprehension, Print Work, and Fluency
5. Talking About Books: Improving Partnerships and Clubs
6. Reading with Fluency and Expression: Shared Reading, Warm-Up and Transfer Groups, and Performance Clubs
7. Moving Readers to the Next Level: Text-Level Introduction Groups
8. Organizing and Managing Small-Group Conferring: Common Questions

Listen to Jennifer Serravallo's interview with Choice Literacy.

In Teaching Reading in Small Groups, Jennifer Serravallo provides a multitude of explicit examples of language to use to deepen students’ engagement and understanding. Her experience as a skilled and reflective practitioner comes through in each of the carefully described teaching scenarios that coach the reader to become better classroom researchers. Her thinking nudges readers to recognize teaching opportunities where before they might only have seen obstacles. Her advice empowers teachers, ultimately making small group instruction feel doable and necessary. For teachers eager and ready to “outgrow their best ideas,” Teaching Reading in Small Groups deserves a place at the top of the professional reading stack.  Kim Yaris, Literacy Builders

For teachers who sometimes feel as if data-based instruction, differentiated groupings, and formative assessments somehow involve going over to The Dark Side, this book is a powerful antidote. It will help you know that you can hold tight to your deepest beliefs about children and literature, classrooms communities, and good teaching. Lucy Calkins
Author of Units of Study for Teaching Reading

Jennifer Serravallo's new book is the kind of book I have been looking for since I started teaching because I always felt like my guided reading instruction could be better. I have a strong feeling that this book will be sitting in the little pile that I always keep by my side throughout the year. reading teacher (new york), August 31, 2010

I just bought Jennifer Serravallo's new book- Teaching Reading in Small Groups. This book is amazing and stays true to RW. Lucy Calkins wrote the forward. I especially like her explicit strategies for teaching small groups in a conference format, not guided reading. She separates shared reading from the mini-lesson. I am going to follow her sample schedule. The sample second grade schedule is as follows:

Minilesson - 7 minutes
Read alone- 15 minutes
Partnership - 10 minutes
Read alone- 15 minutes
Share - 5 minutes

This is one of the best books I bought this summer! KC2, August 10, 2010

Practical, insightful and reality-based. Great tips for moving kids forward and tapping into their individual needs and strengths. A must buy. Lara Parent, Michigan, October 2, 2010

This is a great resource to add to one's library on teaching reading. It is very focused and detailed on how to use on-going assessments for all areas of reading instruction and how to balance strategy lessons, fluency work, partnerships, book clubs, guided reading, conferences and more. I have been teaching reading (3rd -5th grade) for ten years, and I couldn't put this book down. Amy, Texas, July 27, 2011