Guided Practice for Reading Growth, Grades 4-8. Laura Robb

      Set aside time, every two to three weeks, to review the notes for each student. Start with students who aren’t making enough progress and see if your notes offer clues for moving that child forward. For example, I noticed that fifth grader Jaylinda’s poetry reading, at the end of each week, wasn’t fluent and expressive, even though there was time for daily practice with a partner. A review of my notes revealed she had not read her poem to her partner during the last two weeks. Instead of making this a behavior issue, I observed Jaylinda and her partner every day for a week. When her fluency and expression improved, I conferred with her and discussed the benefits of daily practice. Having the notes pinpointed the issue and enabled me to design a positive intervention instead of calling attention to what she wasn’t doing and risk enlarging her frustration and anger.

      Developing Readers Need Four Key Literacy Experiences

      Guided practice lessons can nudge students forward quickly when they are part of a literacy rich classroom that values daily teacher read-alouds, instructional and independent reading, and notebook writing about reading. To move students forward quickly, you’ll have to maintain a balance between:

      This four-pronged approach allows you to read aloud to model expressive, fluent reading, enlarge students’ vocabulary and background knowledge, and show students how good readers react to and think about texts. Independent reading offers students the practice they need (but often haven’t had) to enjoy books they choose and want to read (Gambrell, Marinak, Brooker, & McCrea-Andrews, 2011). Finally, students who write about their reading can improve comprehension of a text by 24 percentile points (Graham, Harris, & Santangelo, 2015).

      The texts David Harrison and I invite you to use for guided practice lessons are on topics that interest students in Grades 4 on up, but they also challenge their depth of thinking and enlarge their vocabulary and background knowledge. These students don’t have lots of time to grow and improve as readers. By the end of eighth grade, they should be reading close to or on grade level. To support this ambitious goal, all four elements need to be part of your ELA block (see Appendix B for possible schedules).

      Teaching Tip

      If the lessons students complete indicate there’s not enough progress, it’s important to provide support quickly so small confusions don’t become obstacles to learning. Interventions can be working through lessons one-on-one, pairing a student with a classmate who gets it, or re-teaching using a new short poem or text from Appendix I or a text you choose. Appendix I provides additional original poems and short texts by David Harrison, and Appendixes H and J provide suggested sources for short texts, books, and poetry.

      The four elements, like a string quartet, make literacy music for developing (and all) readers because each element offers them the instruction and independent practice they need to become proficient readers.

      Developing Readers Need Guided Practice

      Guided practice is instructional reading in which students practice with a short text independently or with a partner. Most guided practice lessons can be completed in 15 to 30 minutes. You’ll discover whether students have absorbed what you’ve modeled in a mini-lesson or interactive read-aloud. It’s the practice piece that lets you know students’ level of understanding, their use of vocabulary and background knowledge to improve recall and comprehension, and their ability to discuss using text evidence. Your careful observation of students during guided practice helps you decide on instructional moves that improve students’ application of a strategy or completing a task on their own. By basing interventions on how students navigate a short text you can decide to:

       Confer with a student to deepen your understanding of his/her work.

       Have the student redo parts of the guided practice while you observe and help.

       Support a student or small group by asking them to explain their thinking and then think aloud to model how you would respond. Gradually release the responsibility for rethinking and adjusting responses to students.

       Pair-up students and ask them to support one another as they rethink and redo parts of their work.

      First, take the time to analyze the results of a shared reading lesson and/or students’ independent or paired guided practice. This information enables you to intervene to bring all students to a level of understanding that allows them to experience success when reading a book at their instructional level. The guided practice lessons in this book use poems and short fiction and nonfiction texts written by award winning author and poet, David Harrison. These poems and short texts introduce your developing reader to outstanding, beautifully written literature on topics of interest to students their age. In other words, your developing readers won’t feel embarrassed about reading baby books or be bored by the subject matter.

      Teaching Tip

      While students self-select books from your class library and read for 15 to 20 minutes a day, you can confer with and support individuals or small groups. Or you can take a chunk of instructional reading time for interventions and have students who aren’t working with you read independently.

      Developing Readers Need to Experience the Benefits of Rereading

      For several months, I worked with a group of seventh grade English language learners. During the first week with these students, I discovered that they had never read a book or used a reader’s notebook. Instead, these students read short texts on the front and back of 6 × 8 cards and completed a fill-in-the-blank or multiple-choice worksheet relating to the selection. They never reread parts of the short text if they were unsure of how to answer a question. Their progress, understandably, was limited because they weren’t reading enough. Based on their experiences, they described reading as boring and pointless.

      The first time I introduced rereading using a think-aloud to spotlight my confusion of a section of a The First Step: How One Girl Put Segregation on Trial (by Susan E. Goodman, illustrated by E. B. Lewis), a student blurted out, “Just skip it.” Lots of nods from others let me know that rereading was not a strategy they used, nor did they understand its benefits. I continued and then pointed out how I could better understand the passage after rereading. While thinking aloud with different read-alouds, students practiced with me when we worked together on a common text. Each day, we’d read a common text and reread a confusing part or reread a few sentences to figure out the meaning of an unfamiliar word or re-enjoy a funny or moving part. I also explained, many times, that the good readers in their classes valued and used rereading.

      Proficient and advanced readers continually use rereading to savor favorite parts of texts, to clarify meaning, and improve recall

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