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
