How to Build Better Small-Group Reading Instruction

Reading teachers have already started the school year in a slump, with students’ reading ability at a 20-year low.

As educators look for ways to help students advance academically, research suggests that refining traditional classroom reading groups could help.

During an Education Week with Educators webinar on Thursday, Professor of Special Education Matthew Burns spoke about how to improve the effectiveness of small group teaching. Burns, the director of the University of Missouri’s Center for Collaborative Solutions for Children, Practice, and Policy, said effective small-group reading instruction can span different grades and subject areas, but students should be spaced based on the specific abilities they need they need improve comprehension, fluency, phonetics and phonemic awareness – not general reading levels.

It’s a small but crucial difference: It’s not that reading groups are inherently bad practice, but the way they’ve traditionally been set up by achievement groups has the potential to wreak academic havoc.

The following questions and answers have been edited for length and clarity. Listen to the full discussion in the webinar, Getting Reading Groups Right.”

How should teachers approach the use of equal ability groups versus different ability groups?

If you conduct homogeneous (grouping with same ability), it is important to group children with similar ability, you can differentiate teaching. I do heterogeneous grouping when I am applies Capabilities. So when we do partner reading, for example, we make a heterogeneous group. We don’t take the lowest of the low and put them together with the highest of the high. We’re pushing it so the abilities aren’t crazy different, but there are certainly stronger and lower readers out there. We’ve seen both kids grow really well, and we have data that shows the older kids grow quite a bit too.

How should teachers decide on skills for grouping?

So a teacher might say, wow, in my class I have two children who struggle with phonemic awareness and seven have problems with phonetics and one [kid who needs help with] Fluency. The other teacher says, well, I have three fluent children, three phonetic awareness and one phonemic awareness. So we’re going to group these kids, and we’re going to take another inventory and say these four kids are struggling with this aspect of decoding, and two of those kids are in your class and two are in my class. So we can juggle kids across classes to get more precise groupings for interventions, but we use big bucket skill grouping as part of the lesson.

What role should student choice and interest play in setting up reading groups?

I have some reservations about using interest as a driving force for grouping. We conducted a study in which we examined how well a child can read a book [controlling for] several factors, and interest in the book was consistently inconclusive. All things being equal and if you group by ability and want the kids to choose between two or three different things to read, go safe with that, but it has to be something they can read.

Is there consensus on the optimal structure for using reading groups – for example, the best group size or how long students should spend in groups?

Yes and no. We conducted a meta-analysis in 2018 examining 26 studies on small group reading intervention. The correlation between effectiveness and group size was not zero, but was quite small.
Smaller [groups]are generally more effective, so we have recommendations of around three to five. The older the children are, the larger the groups can be, for middle and high school groups.

Recommendations for the number of minutes [to spend in groups] are 15 to 20 minutes, but that depends more on how much time is needed for the intervention and the children’s attention span. The only compelling study I’ve seen on this topic is a recently published study on frequency. [Researchers found] When you kept class minutes constant, but split them into multiple sessions throughout the week, you saw greater effects.

How often should students be assessed to change reading groups?

That depends on the intensity of the need. We need growth data to make good decisions. And I hear people say, “Well, yes, but if we keep a child in an intervention group for eight to ten weeks, is that too long?” Well, really no. If I collect data each week, I have 10 data points to make a reliable decision.

As a class teacher, I will rate my weak readers once a week, every two weeks, and the better readers, once a month or so. And you have the flexibility to group as many times as you think you need within the parameters.

In recent years, reading teachers have had to give many more online reading classes. What have we learned about using virtual reading groups?

What we’ve learned during the pandemic is creating some opportunities for different types of work. I can have a kid in this classroom and a kid in the classroom down the hall reading to each other because they can use a Google Doc to share a form and they can use Zoom to talk to each other. But there has to be one more aspect of modeling that I think needs to happen.

If you find yourself face to face again, I would encourage you [teachers] Using your creativity in the application of technology, more on the practice and application side than actual modeling and initial training.

How should English learners be involved in reading groups?

We judge them the same way English speakers do, and where they shake, they shake. But sometimes we might need to dig a little deeper. For example, if we believe that a child does not have phonemic awareness, we should assess their phonemic awareness in their native language since phonemic awareness carries over.

But there is a difference to children who become bilingual: always, always, always incorporate vocabulary into the lesson. So if I’m doing a small group on phonetics, and I’m going to teach the “-ch” today [sound]I’ll show the kid maybe three pictures that start with the “-ch” like chair, chip, whatever. And I’ll explain, OK, that’s a picture of a chair. Chair starts with “ch” in English. What does that mean in your language?