Top 5 Aspects of Small Group Instruction to Plan for NOW!

Hey, there, happy Monday. Thank you so much for tuning in. Today, we are going to be talking all about small group instruction and how to make sure that we are planning really for everything.

Now I know that it is the middle of summer. And most of you won’t be starting your small group lessons until September or October. But I also know that small group instruction is one of the most asked about questions that I get from y’all. So I wanted to make sure that I did at least one episode this summer that focuses on small group instruction.

And don’t worry, I’ll definitely be talking about it more once we get closer to the school year or once the school year actually begins. But if during the summer, if small groups is something that you really want to improve this year, and you need more support beyond this episode, than I would encourage you to do two things.

First, go back and listen to my podcast series from last summer on small group instruction. Starting with episode number 89, I did a three part series all about small group instruction. It’s got lots of great information, go back and give those episodes a listen.

And then the second thing is is I would invite you to consider to join us inside the Stellar Literacy Collective. This is our membership site for third, fourth and fifth grade teachers. And inside our membership, we have two sets of ready to print small group lessons. It literally has everything you need lesson plans, reading passages, graphic organizers, all of all of those things answer keys.

And one of the sets is really geared towards fourth and fifth grade students who are reading on grade level. And then another set is geared towards third grade students or older students who might still be struggling with reading, and our members get access to both sets. And recently I know it’s like getting access to lesson plans as part of it.

But thinking about how having access to these lesson plans will change your instruction is what I really want you to consider. And recently I heard from Meredith, who is one of the teachers who used our small group lesson sets this past year.

And she said, “This was my first year actually feeling confident doing small groups, all thanks to these lessons. Everything was well organized and the teacher lesson plans were so helpful. My students got used to the routine and small groups were actually effective. Also, the stories included were very high interest for my students. Thanks for making such a great resource and making me more confident in small reading groups.”

So if you really want to tackle small group lessons and feel confident doing so then our membership might be a good fit for you. Doors to the membership opened up on July 10. So if you want to be on our notification list and be the first to find out when doors are open, you can get on that waitlist at stellarteacher.com/waitlist.

So today, I’m going to share the five aspects of small group instruction that you need to plan for. And I figured this would be a really good summer episode, because it’s going to kind of give you all of the things that you can start thinking about now. So that way, when you are ready to start small group instruction, you’ve got everything planned for and ready to go.

So the first thing you need to plan for is you need to have a plan for the rest of your class. And this is the very first step in having effective small group instruction. You can’t run small groups in your class, if you don’t have a plan for what the rest of your students are going to be doing. And this is definitely a step that you don’t want to treat as an afterthought.

So you don’t want to just focus all of your attention on what are you going to do with your small groups? How are you going to form your small groups, and I’ll worry about the rest of the class later. Because you have to think about while you’re meeting with one small group, the majority of your students are going to be engaged in something else.

And you really want that something else to be productive and you want it to help them grow as readers and writers. One of my most popular episodes on small group instruction was episode number 89, where I talk all about how to set up your classroom for small group success. I spent an entire episode going through that but let me be kind of the rundown.

You know, there’s a variety of things that you can have your students do while pulling small groups, and it’s important to create a plan that works for both you and your planning style and your management style, but it also works for your students.

Three of my favorite things that you can have the rest of your class do while you’re pulling small groups is one, super easy have them do independent reading or writing. This could be a self selected text that they come up with. This could be a class novel that you’re working your way through, this could be a text or something related to, you know, a topic in science or social studies.

Whatever it is, it’s independent reading. And usually when we say independent reading that also comes with things like accountability through a stop and jot sticky note where they’re jotting down some questions or their thoughts, or maybe filling out a graphic organizer after they finish reading or answering some questions. So there’s definitely some writing and responding as well.

Another option that you could do is literacy centers. And I’m actually going to be doing an episode on this in two weeks. But you could come up with different literacy centers that your students engage in, and maybe every day, they do you know, one to three different rotations. And this is a great opportunity for your students to engage in a variety of reading skills.

So maybe you have a fluency center, maybe there’s a vocabulary or a word work center, maybe you have a poetry center, or a research center or something specific like that. So literacy centers are another great way to keep your students engaged while you’re pulling small groups.

And then the last one is simply a teacher assigned task. And this might be doing something different every single day, it might be every Monday, they do the same type of assignment every Tuesday, they do the same type of assignment. You know, this could be giving your students a reading passage with some questions. This could be having them complete some sort of word sort activity, it’s a variety of things.

But really, you’re just giving them a specific assignment. And the students who are not in your small group are going to complete that assignment while you can pull a small group.

There are pros and cons to all of these options. And like I said, it really comes down to what is your teaching style? What is your management style? And what are your students learning needs? So I would encourage you to think of all of those things.

But the first thing that you really need to plan for when thinking about small groups is the rest of your class, what are your students going to be engaged in while you’re pulling your small groups.

So the second thing you need to do is have a plan for your actual small group lessons. And this is kind of broken down into two different things. When you’re thinking about planning your small group lessons, you want to think about planning both the content so what is the objective and focus of your lesson, but then you also want to think about and having a plan for the structure of your lesson.

And I suggest using some sort of structure or framework for your small group lessons, this is going to make planning and teaching so much easier for you. And if you think about it, you know, we have a structure for our whole group lessons, or at least I hope you do, you know, we want to have a structure for how we do our read alouds a structure for how we do word work, all parts of our literacy block, ideally will have some sort of structure. And so we want to have a structure or framework for our small group lessons.

One of the frameworks that we use with all of our small group lessons that we have inside the Stellar Literacy Collective, is what I like to call the Four T Model. And that means during your small group lesson, you’re going to break it up into four parts. You’re going to target, so the very first thing you’re going to do is identify what is the specific focus the objective for your small group lesson, the second part is teach.

Now you’re going to spend a little bit of time teaching that specific objective. But if you think about it, or remember, your small group lesson isn’t necessarily where you’re teaching something brand new. A lot of times, it’s a review of something that you’ve previously taught. So this teach section should go pretty quick.

And then the third part of your small group lesson is tackle. And this is where the students are actually doing the work. They’re going to be the ones reading they’re going to be discussing, they’re going to be writing, they’re going to be applying whatever it is that you want them to focus on. And the tackle section should be the longest portion of your small group, because small group is really an opportunity for students to get some guided practice and support. So they’re doing the work, you’re just there to provide assistance as needed.

And then the last T is transfer. And that’s when you wrap up your lesson and try to remind your students that this is something that you want them to do when they’re reading independently, when they’re back at their desks, when they’re reading tomorrow, and the next day, the next day. So that’s when you wrap up your lesson and help them transfer the skills to future reading and writing.

And really, when you’re thinking about your small group structure, you really want to pay attention to students and are they going to be reading? Are they going to be talking and discussing about a text? And are they going to be writing? We want our students engaged in those three activities. And we really want to be mindful of how much teacher talk is happening at the table.

Which is why I think having a framework like that Four T model can be really helpful because when we think of the the time breakdown the tackle section is the biggest section and it reminds us that, Okay, we need to talk less, and our students need to do more work. So figure out a framework, feel free to use that same model with all of your small groups. And if you want access to, you know, different lessons that could support you definitely consider joining us inside the Stellar Literacy Collective later this summer.

But the second thing that you want to think about is the content. So what is the goal of your specific small group lesson? You know, what is it that you want your students to become more proficient at? And that is honestly going to vary depending on your specific students. And it’s going to vary from group to group to group.

Some students might be working on, you know, more phonics heavy skills, and other students might be working about writing about reading, and other students might be working on understanding a specific genre or text. So keep in mind that the content is going to vary. But ultimately, we want to make sure that we are making data informed decisions.

So I would suggest using some sort of data to help you determine your groups. And there’s so many different options for this, you could give your students an oral reading assessment at the start of the year and figure out their reading levels or if anything figure out, you know, are they struggling with accuracy, fluency, comprehension.

You could give your students a phonics screener at the start of the year to see if they are still working on decoding skills. And if you need to give your small group lessons a phonics focus, you could also use a beginning of the year benchmark assessment that your district provided to identify specific standards that your students are struggling with. And if you don’t have access to any assessment to help you form groups, you can still plan on pulling small groups.

And you can still use data to inform your decisions. Just use your weekly assessments, even if it’s formative, so you don’t have to have necessarily a multiple choice test. Or you know, a fill in the blank test in order to group your students just start to pay attention. Okay, how are my students responding to this specific objective this week? How do my students handle this standard? Okay, are my students fluent? Are they reading with accuracy? And use your formative assessments to help you figure out what your students need support with.

And if that’s not even an option, you still have one more way that you can plan for the content. And that is simply to ask your students. I did this a lot when I taught fourth grade, because especially by the time students get to fourth and fifth grade, they have a pretty good understanding of when they can grasp a concept and when they’re still struggling with this.

And so at the end of the week, when I’m starting to make my plan for the following week, I would ask my students who needs help with understanding text structure? You know, who needs help with writing a summary? Who needs help with understanding chapter two of our class novel? Who needs help with syllabication? Whatever it is, ask your students, if they are struggling, and more than likely, they’ll tell you Yeah, I still need help with that.

And if that’s the case, then I plan on meeting them in a small group one or two times the following week to help them on that specific skill. So whether it is by asking your students or using formative assessments, or a formal assessment that your district gives you, we want to plan the content based off of some sort of data.

And like I said, ideally, the content that you cover in your small groups is going to vary from group to group, because it’s going to be based on your student’s needs. So you shouldn’t be doing the same small group with every single group of students, the same small group lesson that is, every lesson in your small groups should be slightly different, because every student’s needs are going to be different. So make sure you have a plan for both the content and the structure of your small group.

Now, this is a big one, but you want to come up with a plan for your materials. And I don’t know about you, but I struggled to to keep up with paper. Paper was like my arch nemesis, when I was teaching in the classroom, I just feel like there was there, there is so much paper in a classroom, it’s just part of it. And you have to think about it.

You know, if you have four to five small groups and your class, that is four to five different sets of materials, four to five different lesson plans, four to five different sets of texts, four to five sets of response activities, or graphic organizers. And some groups are maybe meeting twice a week, some groups are meeting meeting maybe once a week. So it’s a lot of materials to manage.

And so you really want to come up with an organizational plan for how you want to store and manage your materials. And again, this is going to vary depending on your preferences and style.

But some things that worked for me is I would use bins if my students had books. So if we were working through like a chapter book, like a book study, or my students were, you know, reading a smaller decodable book or a level of text and they all had a book that they were working through, I would keep all of the materials for that group in a bin.

If our groups were working on more like paper passages, so you know, something I would print off or a set of task cards or something, then I would just keep those materials in a folder because it took up less space. But generally speaking, I would have like a shelf next to my small group table and I would either have the bins and or the folders. right there, so they were easy to grab.

And I also had a tub that stayed at my small group table that had some additional materials that my students might need during our small group lesson. So it had things like sticky notes, and note cards and highlighters and pens. And sometimes I would bring in silly glasses or pointers to keep them engaged.

And I also would keep reference materials. I talk a lot about and if you’ve used any of our resources, like if you have our small group lesson sets, we include little mini anchor charts, I call them strategy cards. And so I would have a ring with those strategy cards. So that way, if a student needed to refer back to them, while they’re reading or writing, and they didn’t bring their own, they could easily grab that from the bin.

Or we have the different reference sheets that have like the tabs for fiction and nonfiction, you know, skills and objectives. And so I would have a couple sets of those. So that way, if students needed to be reminded of something while they’re working, they could reference something if I wasn’t immediately available to help them. So I liked having some of those additional materials as well available for small groups.

But other things that I did that would help with paper management and materials management is I would have one of my planning days during the week, I would dedicate it to my small groups, and I would look ahead to which groups am I meeting? How many groups am I meeting with? How many times am I meeting with them? What materials do we need? What are we focusing on? And I would make all of my copies once for the week for all of my groups.

And I would also try to think about how can I keep materials to a minimum? So can we reuse a passage that we’ve already used, but discuss something differently? Can we take a passage that we used in a whole group and use it for our small group? You know, can students share something? So I always tried to keep our materials to a minimum.

But you definitely want to think about the materials that you’re using for your small groups, where you’re going to find them and how you’re going to store them. And then you also want to think about what are you going to do with the materials when you’re done with them? So if you have books, like what is your return process? You know, do you have a school library that you have to return the books to?

Is there a place that you can store them in your class and do that, you know, sort of batch that on like a monthly basis. If it’s paper materials, do you recycle them immediately after the lesson or send them with your students. So think about how you’re going to sort of transition old materials into new materials, but definitely spend some time and create a plan for the materials you want to use during your small group lessons.

Okay, the fourth thing you want to plan for is plan to review, reflect and analyze data. And this is so important. And I feel like something that we that teachers don’t get enough time for. It’s not that we don’t think it’s important, I just think you don’t get enough time to do this, because there’s so many things that are on your plate.

But you definitely want to be intentional about reviewing and reflecting on your small group instruction and how it’s going. And when possible look at data analysis. And this doesn’t need to take a ton of time. And it doesn’t need to be super formal. But you do want to be intentional about thinking about it, because the goal of your small group instruction is to help students grow and make progress.

And so we want to make sure that we see evidence of that progress. And one of the best ways to do that is to give yourself an opportunity to regularly reflect on your small group instruction. And I think this is important because not every student is going to grow or progress at the same pace, which means more than likely, at some point during the year, you’re gonna have to adjust your groups.

And in order to make sure they’re staying, you know, kind of the most effective, you want to make sure that you’re reflecting on them and making changes as necessary. Now, the tricky thing is, is that there’s no set timeline, you know, that says you need to switch your groups every four weeks or every semester. So it’s kind of just up to you, whenever you start to realize that okay, I think I need to make some adjustments to my groups.

And the best way to do that is to regularly reflect on how they’re going. And so I would encourage you to do a quick little mini weekly reflection, and then a monthly reflection and a quarterly reflection.

And on a weekly basis, you can ask yourself questions like, did I meet with all the groups that I wanted to this week? Did we make it through all of our lessons? What groups do I need to prioritize this next week? And then what objectives topics do we need to focus on? And these questions are going to help you make sure that you’re balancing your small group instructional time in the way that you intended.

You know, if you do a weekly reflection, and you realize, okay, wait, there’s one group that I always run short or less than we never have enough time, then you can make some adjustments. So weekly, you want to kind of just make sure that organizational wise, you’re focusing on the groups that you intended to and that your plans are actually happening.

Monthly, you want to really start to look at the progress of your students. So asking yourself questions like, What progress are students or groups making? What objectives topics have we taught that I need to continue to spiral in my small groups? Or what objectives or topics are coming up that I can support during my small groups? And then really asking yourself do I need to make any changes to what the rest of my class is doing when I pull small groups?

And these questions are gonna help you make sure that the content and the focus of your small groups, as well as what the rest of your class is doing, is actually meeting your students needs. And maybe you’ll make some small changes along the way. And I would encourage you not to necessarily make big changes, weekly, or monthly, but you still want to check in with yourself to see how they’re going.

Now quarterly, you want to ask yourself, are my groups still serving my students? Do I need to make any changes to the students in each group? Do I need to shift the focus of any of my groups? And what data do I need to collect to inform my small group instruction? And these questions are really going to make sure that you have the right students in the right groups, and you’re actively collecting data to inform your instruction to make sure that you’re focusing on the right objectives.

Because you know, after a quarter of instruction, you might realize that you have some students that are still really struggling with decoding. And you need to shift the focus of their groups to be more phonics focused to where they’re actually learning how to read, rather than focusing on responding or comprehending. So paying attention to, you know, the content, and really the, you know, is the structure of these groups serving my students. And if not, then you can make adjustments as needed.

The final thing you want to plan for is to plan for interruptions. You’re going to have them so no matter how good of a plan you have for the rest of the class, you will have interruptions during your small group lessons. And I think it’s important for you to accept the fact that like this small group time is not going to be perfect. And if you can be okay, with things not being perfect, they’re actually going to go a lot smoother.

I would encourage you to build in some buffer time. So maybe you have one extra small group slot that isn’t assigned. And you use that in case a group ran late or you had to skip a group. So that way, you’re not stressing that you missed a group that week. And I would also encourage you to not stop your small group lesson for one or two students who are off task.

I think, oftentimes, we get so hyper focused about, you know, students, disrupting the class or not even disrupting the class, but we’re paying attention to the rest of the class and students who aren’t doing what they’re supposed to be doing that we forget that okay, am I really willing to stop a small group and disrupt the 22 students who are on task, simply because one or two students aren’t doing what they’re supposed to do?

So let the two students who are off tasks just carry on and have a conversation with them afterwards. But let everybody else stay on task, because when we disrupt our small groups and the rest of the class, it takes our students a little bit longer to get back into the swing of things.

So it’s important for you to really plan ahead and make a decision now, how are you going to handle interruptions and disruptions so that way, when they do happen, because they will happen, you’re going to know how to best prevent them. So make some decisions.

Now, how are you going to handle it when one student tries to interrupt your group? How are you going to handle it if a student has a question, and you’re in the middle of a small group? How are you going to handle it if the entire class is off task? How are you going to handle it if another teacher or specialist comes into your room, and you’re in the middle of a small group lesson, and they have a question for you or they need something?

So make decisions about how you want to handle these interruptions now, so that way, they won’t become stressful when they happen during the year.

Okay, so those are the five things that you need to plan for. You need to have a plan for the rest of your class, you need to have a plan for your small group lesson structure and content, you need to have a plan for your materials. You need to have a plan for how you’re going to review, reflect and analyze data. And you need to have a plan for interruptions because we know they’re going to happen.

Now if you want to see a sample small group lesson that uses the Four T model that I mentioned earlier in this episode, then go to stellarteacher.com/small-group. That’s stellarteacher.com/small-group, to grab a sample lesson and reading passage and student questions that go along with it so you can kind of see how that structure is set up.

Don’t forget, during the summer, we are airing bonus episodes. Every Thursday, I am releasing a shorter episode that is part of a series called Small Steps to SOR aka the science of reading. So if you are wanting to learn more about the science of reading and discover small steps that you can take to align your instruction with the research, then these Thursday episodes are perfect for you. We just started this series last Thursday so you haven’t missed much and I hope you’ll tune in. Until then have a stellar week.