Teaching Reading in Small Groups: Differentiated Instruction for Building Strategic, Independent Readers

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.

Jennifer Serravallo is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Reading Strategies Book and The Writing Strategies Book, which have been translated into Spanish, French, and Chinese. These and her other popular books and resources help teachers make goal-directed responsive strategy instruction, conferring, and small group work doable in every classroom. Her newest titles are Teaching Writing in Small Groups, A Teacher's Guide to Reading Conferences, Understanding Texts and Readers, and the assessment and teaching resource Complete Comprehension for Fiction and Nonfiction. Jen is a frequently invited speaker at national and regional conferences and travels throughout the US and Canada to provide full-day workshops and to work with teachers and students in classrooms. She is also an experienced online educator who regularly offers live webinar series and full-day online workshops, and is the creator of two self-paced asynchronous online courses, most recently Strategies in Action: Reading and Writing Methods and Content. Jen began her career in education as an NYC public school teacher. Now as a consultant, she has spent the last fifteen+ years helping teachers across the country create literacy classrooms where students are joyfully engaged, and the instruction is meaningfully individualized to students' goals. Jen is also a member of Parents Magazine Board of Advisors for education and literacy. Jen holds a BA from Vassar College and an MA from Teachers College, where she has also taught graduate and undergraduate classes. Learn more about Jen and her work at Hein.pub/serravallo, on Twitter @jserravallo, on Instagram @jenniferserravallo, or by joining The Reading and Writing Strategies Facebook Community.