How to Teach Small Groups: 6 Steps For Reading Success

How to teach small groups?

That was a phrase I googled A LOT my first year of teaching.

Small group instruction is such an important part of your reading block. It is a chance for you to provide targeted and differentiated instruction that will help each of your students grow as readers.

It’s also a great chance to connect with students on a more personal level. During your small group lessons, you can get to know your students as readers. You can find out their reading preferences, their strengths, and their challenges.

But most teachers don’t feel confident with how to teach small groups in their own classroom… I know I wasn’t super confident when I first started.

Getting started with small group instruction can feel overwhelming at times. If you are looking for ways to improve the effectiveness of your small group reading instruction, keep reading. I’ve got six steps you can take that will help you learn how to teach small groups and experience success at your small group reading table.

Wondering how to teach small groups? Start with these six steps!

Step #1: Plan meaningful and engaging activities for the rest of your students to work on while you pull a small group.

If you’ve been wondering how to teach small groups, before you can refine what happens at your small group table, you need to make sure that the rest of your class is engaged.

In order to have effective small group reading instruction, you need to make sure that you have enough uninterrupted time to actually teach your small group. This means that the rest of your students need to be engaged in a meaningful reading or writing task while you pull your small group.

If your students are not independent for 15-20 minutes, this is the first thing you need to address before trying to teach anything at your small group table.

Here are a few ideas of reading and writing tasks your students could engage in while you pull small groups:

• Independent Reading
• Literacy Centers or Workstations
• Book Clubs
• Literacy Routines like Poem of the Week or Root of the Week

In order to make sure that your students are truly independent, spend some time helping students build their independent reading stamina, review expectations for this portion of your reading block, and practice. 

Make sure that your students can be engaged in something meaningful for 15-20 min so you have time to focus on the small group at your table.  

Now that you have the rest of your class engaged, let’s talk about how to teach small groups at your reading table.

Step #2: Plan your small group lesson around a reading objective that will benefit the students in that group.

Your small group reading instruction will only work if it is providing the students in that group with guidance and support in the specific reading area that they need.

It’s important to remember that not every student has the same reading roadblock or challenge and in order for you to be able to help all of your students grow, you need to make sure you are correctly identifying the individual needs of each student.

For example, if you have a student who struggles with accuracy and fluency, then providing more support in comprehension during your small group lesson isn’t going to be as beneficial as providing a guided phonics lesson to help them improve their accuracy.

More than likely, each of your small groups will have a different need or focus area and it’s important that you can pinpoint and identify exactly what each small group needs.

In upper elementary, you might need to focus on the following in some of your small groups:

• Comprehension skills or strategies
• Identifying and understanding different text structures
• Reading and breaking down multi-syllabic words
• Identifying and understanding affixes and roots
• Writing about reading
• Annotating a text

Step #3: Find materials that support your specific lesson objective.

Once you know the objective and focus area for your small group lesson, you want to make sure you are finding materials that will support the objectives for each small group lesson.

Your small group lesson will only be as effective as the materials you provide for your students.

Even if you KNOW the exact objective your students need to work on, if you don’t have materials to support that objective, your students won’t be able to grow in that area.

For example, if you are teaching a small group lesson on the suffix -ed and the three different sounds it makes /id/ /d/ /t/, you need to make sure that your students have a text that actually has all three sounds in it. Your lesson won’t really be meaningful for your students if the text and materials you provide don’t connect to your objective.

Planning and finding materials to support your small group lesson is essential to the success of your small group lesson.

Knowing how important the right materials are to small group success is one of the reasons why we created our small group strategy lesson plans… we wanted to make it so much easier for teachers to find materials that matched up with the objective they were trying to teach.

Step #4: Structure your small group lessons to give students time to practice or engage with the objective.

It can be really tempting to TEACH for the entire 15-20 minutes of your small group lesson. But it’s important to remember that the only way our students will grow as readers is if they actually get time to practice whatever your lesson objective is.

During your small group lesson they need to be able to practice reading, or sorting, or blending, or writing, or discussing, or whatever your objective is.

Students need to have time to engage with the text during their small group lesson.

This means you need to limit your teacher talk and structure your small group lesson in a way that gives students enough time to practice.

A really easy way to structure your small group lesson is with the 4T model.

• TARGET – 1 min: Tell your students what the target is for the lesson (tell them the focus objective).
• TEACH – 2-3 min: Spending just a few minutes to review or remind students of the steps, questions, rules, or processes for the focus objective. Most of the time your small group lesson will be reteaching something so you shouldn’t need a ton of time to review it. I suggest using an anchor chart, strategy card, or some other visual tool to help this portion of your lesson go quickly.
• TACKLE – 8-10 min: Students will get to practice whatever the focus skill is. Maybe they are reading. Maybe they are writing. Maybe they are manipulating words. Maybe they are discussing. But students should get the majority of your small group lesson to do some sort of work.
• TRANSFER – 1-3 min: This is where you wrap up your lesson and help students make the transfer to their independent reading. Remind them how they can apply the same objective anytime they are reading independently.

Step #5: Consider how you can make your small group time more fun.

It is so important that we are constantly thinking about how we can make reading more fun and enjoyable for our students. This means we need to consider how we can make our small group lessons more fun as well.

There are a ton of ways you can make your small group lessons fun. And most of the time it just takes the addition of a few extra materials or routines to do so.

Here are some simple ideas:

• Give students fun highlighters to use during your small group lesson.
• Give students special post-it notes.
• Let students use special reading glasses or pointers to read (yes, this works in upper elementary).
• Play special music during your small group lessons or transition time.
• Turn on a fun lamp or display a fireplace on your smartboard

You could even do something as simple as starting each small group lesson with a joke or a riddle. It doesn’t need to take long, and it doesn’t even need to be connected to reading. Just some rituals that your students look forward to.

Step #6: Assess to see if your small group instruction is working.

Often times when we think about how to teach small groups, we forget about what happens after we teach the lesson… assessment.

This is one of the most important parts of providing effective small group reading instruction but is often forgotten. If you are going to take the time to plan and teach a small group lesson, you also want to make sure that it is working and your students are making progress in the area you are supporting them in during small group.

There are several ways you can assess your students during a small group lesson:

• Look for evidence of growth on weekly assessments
• Provide an exit ticket or quick check after 2-3 small group lessons on the same objective
• See if the student is making growth on their homework or independent practice
• Notice if the student participates more in small group or whole group discussions
• Check-in with the student during a reading conference to see if they are making progress

Ultimately, you want to find evidence that tells you your small group instruction is working.

Ok, let me recap real quick. 

If you did a Google search for “how to teach small groups” and it brought you to this post, I hope you are feeling a lot more confident in your ability to teach a small group reading lesson.

Here are six steps you can take to maximize the effectiveness of your small group reading instruction: 

1. Make sure the rest of your students have something meaningful and engaging to work on.
2. Plan your lessons around a reading objective that will benefit the students in that group. 
3. Find materials that support your specific lesson objective.
4. Structure your small group lesson time so students are engaged in practice… limit teacher talk. 
5. Consider how you can make your small group time more fun. 
6. Don’t forget to reflect and assess the effectiveness of your small group lessons. 

Now you know how to teach small groups in your own classroom. If you would like help using the 4T model during your small group lessons, be sure to grab my FREE Small Group Teacher Guide below!

Happy Teaching!

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