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 and comprehension. The guided practice lessons in this book invite students to choral or independently whisper read selections or read silently along with you as well as reread pieces to develop fluency and deepen their comprehension of vocabulary and information. When developing readers continually practice reading and rereading, they begin to read with the fluency and expression, which signal understanding and depth of comprehension.
Developing Readers Need to Talk About Texts
Student partners discuss pictures and text to deepen comprehension.
Many developing readers have not had opportunities to read and discuss books with a partner or in a small group. Even if they’ve listened to teachers read books aloud, there’s no guarantee that they were listening and remembering. An ideal time to model how to talk about reading is during daily read-alouds and small group instruction. For example, you can talk about literary elements (see Appendix C), your feelings, and the text structures of informational books such as compare/contrast, cause/effect, and problem solution (Allington & Johnston, 2002; Garas-York & Almasi, 2017; Robb, 2017).
Using the picture book Free As A Bird: The Story of Malala by Lina Maslo as a text, I’ve included examples in italics of the kinds of text-focused talk I model for students. These are examples you can adapt and refine as you plan think-alouds based on a read-aloud or when discussing a common book with small groups:
The protagonist and problems: I know Malala will have problems growing up in Pakistan when people say after her birth, “What bad luck.” This makes me think that adults see girls as second rate, and it’s better to have boy babies.
Feelings the book raised: I felt sad when Malala realizes women didn’t have the same rights as men. She was supposed to marry early and have children. If she had dreams of what she wanted to be, she most likely couldn’t achieve them.
Decisions made: Malala’s father encouraged her to be free and follow her dreams. She attended school and won public speaking contests. The Taliban threatened her life when Malala decided to talk about education for girls. She continued to attend school even though it was dangerous.
Antagonists’ role: The Taliban threats made Malala want to go to school and keep talking about her belief in education for girls. Their threats and the thought of not being able to go to schools gave her strength to speak out.
Outcomes: The enemy shot Malala, but she recovered in England. Once Malala was well, she became an activist, speaking out for equality and education for girls around the world.
Changes in the protagonist: Malala did not accept the traditional role for Pashtun girls. Instead, she spoke out for girls in her country and continues to speak out all over the world. She developed boundless courage and the belief that education and learning was a right for boys and girls.
Settings: The book starts in Pakistan to show a girl’s position in Pashtun society and what Malala fought against. It also shows her father’s and mother’s support for Malala to achieve her dream of being educated.
Cause/Effect: Cause: The government and enemy fired guns at each other. Effect: Malala and her brothers hid in their parents’ bedroom. Secretly, Malala continues to go to school.
Encourage students to notice what your response showed to ensure they understand your thinking. Most
