How to Engage the Rest of Your Class So You Can Pull Small Groups

Hey, there Happy Monday. I know we are a few weeks away from the start of the school year, which means the idea of pulling small groups is probably not on your immediate radar. Yet I know that small group instruction is one of the biggest concerns, hurdles challenges that upper elementary teachers face. And I know this because I get asked a lot of questions about small group instruction.

But the number one question that I get asked when it comes to small group instruction is, what do I do with the rest of my class, so I can pull small groups? And I think this is such a good question to consider. Because here’s the reality, unless you have a really strong instructional plan in place for how you’re going to engage the rest of your class, then your small groups really are going to fail, and they’re not going to be an effective use of your time.

You know, you can have the best small group lesson plan, you can really have the perfect group form, you can have really amazing materials, you can be differentiating to meet the individual needs of your students, you can have the most magical time with those five to six students at your small group table. However, if the rest of your class is off track, you know, if those other 16 to 18 students are disrupting you or they’re disengaged, then you really aren’t getting the most out of your small group time.

So today, I’m going to share with you five different things that you can do to really help you plan backwards for your small group time. And it really starts with how to engage the rest of your class so that you can actually pull small groups.

Now before I get into those steps, I want to just sort of like make this disclaimer because I think sometimes teachers forget that these two things happen simultaneously. You know, when we’re thinking about our literacy block and putting things together, we try to find time for small group instruction. And we also try to find time for independent practice. And independent practice is simply when students get an opportunity to practice whatever literacy skill they need help with and maybe independent practice looks different every day, it could be independent reading, it could be writing about reading.

But those two things independent practice, and small group instruction can happen at the same time. So while your students are reading independently, writing about their reading, working with a partner or working in a workstation, you can pull a small group.

And I also think it’s important to recognize that we don’t have to pull small groups every single day. So you might decide that there are some days where it’s better for you to be fully present and facilitate the independent practice that is happening in your classroom. And there are other days that you might decide it is more important for you to use that time for your students to work independently on their own. So you can pull small groups and meet with students in smaller groups to really differentiate what they need to work on.

But independent practice and small group instruction are happening at the same time in your classroom. So it’s not like you need to find extra time, it’s just we need to make sure our students are trained really, really well to be independent. So that way, if we want to, we can pull small groups.

Okay, so now that we’re on the same page with that, the first thing that you want to do when really thinking about creating a solid plan to engage the rest of your class, is you need to make a plan for how much time you want to spend pulling small groups. So really think about the time and the frequency.

And you need to do this because first of all, you need to know how much time it’s going to take up in your literacy block. But when you think about coming up with a plan for the rest of your class, you need to know how much time are you working with?

You know, so maybe your schedule only allows you to pull one small group a day for 15 minutes. How you plan to engage the rest of your class for that 15 minutes is going to look very different compared to a teacher who maybe pulls small groups twice a week, but she spends 45 minutes when she’s pulling her small groups. So how you engage your students for 45 minutes obviously is going to look very different.

So you need to get crystal clear on you know how much time you plan on pulling small groups. Are you pulling them every single day? Are you only pulling small groups two days a week, three days a week? And then how much time do you have for those small groups? Is it 15 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes? So figure that out, in fact, maybe even pause the podcast, make those decisions, and then come back and continue listening.

So the next thing you’re going to do, once you have your time allotment figured out is you’re going to come up with really the structure for what the rest of your class is going to be doing.

So let me just say, and you guys have heard me say this before, but there are so many different ways that you can be successful as a teacher, which means there’s so many different ways that you can effectively engage the rest of your class while you’re pulling in small group.

And I say that for a couple reasons. Because one, I often hear from teachers who will say things like, Oh, I’ve tried to pull small groups, but I cannot get the rest of my class to be independent. So it does not work for me. Let me remind you, if you’ve tried something in the past, and it does not work for you and your students, you have other options, so don’t let your past experience prevent you from maybe trying something new this next year.

So I’m going to share a couple different ways that you can structure this time. So one option that you have is very simple and very straightforward. And that is simply to engage your students in independent reading. Now, I’m going to say reading with air quotes.

But this is where while you’re pulling small groups, your students are going to spend their time reading independently. And this could look a variety of different ways. You know, one of the things if you have read the book, Shifting the Balance, one of the things that they talk about in that book is how we need to really expand our understanding and definition of what independent reading is.

I think for the longest time independent reading has been a really a staple in the upper elementary classroom. And it definitely serves its purpose. But there’s a lot more that we can do with this independent reading.

So your students could be reading independently, they could also be writing a written response to something that they have read, they could be reading with a partner, they could be reading a self selected text. So maybe they’re choosing to read a graphic novel or a chapter book. But during independent reading, they also could be reading a teacher assigned article, or they could be doing some pre reading for a lesson you’re going to be doing in science or social studies.

So you know, there’s so many options here to what this looks like. But this structure is really focused on students engaging with a text by reading and responding to it in some capacity. And I think a big benefit to this option is that one, it is relatively easy for you to plan, you know, you’re not having to cope with different tasks and activities. And also giving students opportunities to have time reading and responding to texts is going to be beneficial for them.

I think one thing to keep in mind, as I don’t know if it’s a downside, but something to really just pay attention to, you know, is that if you have students who struggle with word recognition and decoding is a challenge for them, and they’ve had a bad experience with independent reading in the past, then this assignment might feel overwhelming to them. It might be, you know, somewhat of a turn off.

And so we really want to think about how are we structuring and setting up this time, so that way all students can be engaged all students can be successful. And that, you know, we’re not setting our students up to be disengaged for 30 minutes, because they can’t fluently read a text on their own, or they have a really bad relationship with the idea of independent reading. But independent reading is one option for you to engage the rest of your class.

Another option is for you to set up literacy centers or literacy workstations. And this is simply where you have a variety of literacy based workstations. You might have a word study station where students are building words with prefixes, suffixes and roots. You might have a poetry station where students are working on their fluency by reading a poem, you might have a research station where students are doing some research on whatever topic you’re currently learning about in science or social studies. You could even have an independent reading station where students are reading independently.

So while you are pulling in small groups, your students are going to rotate through the various stations. And this works well for a teacher who really likes to have a lot of structure. Because a lot of times where students are working at one station, that’s while you’re pulling in a small group, and then when you pull another group, students rotate to another station.

So this is an option that you have and I think a benefit or a positive of this is that it allows students to be up out of their desks and allows them to engage in a variety of literacy tasks. A lot of times it really encourages, you know, cooperation and collaboration. And so it can be really fun for students.

I think something to be aware of, if you’re considering this as a teacher is that this setup definitely requires a lot of management. And it takes a lot of time to set up. You know, really before students can be independent with a specific workstation, they need to have a lot of practice to it, and you need to introduce it to them.

And you know, in addition, if there are workstations, you’re generally speaking having to replace the activities or update the activities, or just make sure that they’re staying current. So this can be a lot of fun and a really great option. But it also requires a little bit more time and people management from teachers, but it is another option that you can consider.

The third option, which I like, because because I feel like it gives the teacher a lot of control is simply using what I refer to as teacher assigned tasks. And that simply means that when you are getting ready to pull small groups, you give your students an assignment. And that assignment could look different every single day.

So maybe one day students are reading a passage or article, and they have to fill out a graphic organizer. Maybe on another day, you’re giving them a word study activity, or a word sord or a word ladder, and they’re doing something to build their word study knowledge. Maybe another day, they’re working with a partner to practice their fluency. And they’re going to do some repeated readings with a partner or echo readings with a partner.

It varies from day to day, you know, and I think the benefit of this option is that you have a lot of flexibility for what you’re going to assign your students. So it really gives you the freedom to adjust the independent practice to whatever it is that your students need to focus on at the time.

The downside to this as that, you know, every time you do a teacher assigned task, you’re going to have to walk them through a specific set of directions, you’re going to have to clear up any confusion, you’re going to have to make sure that you have the materials for the assignment, you’re going to have to make sure that students understand you know, what happens if they finish early. So you know, because it’s not necessarily a set routine, there might be some more setup and prep work to get your students to be independent with this option.

So those are sort of three options. You know, when you’re thinking about what is the physical work that the rest of your class is doing, you could do independent reading, really, we want to think of that as like independent practice, reading centers, or workstations, and then what I refer to as teacher assigned tasks.

And then of course, your other option is just to do a little bit of mixing and matching or a combo. You know, so you could have your students do something like 15 minutes of self selected independent reading, where they’re choosing a chapter book or picture book that they want to read. And then maybe the next cent this the next rotation of small groups, you’re going to be giving them a teacher assigned task, or they would have a very structured workstation to go through.

You could also do something like give your students a choice board with must do and may do activities that include some of the activities that I mentioned above. So again, you got a lot of options for how you want to engage your students.

But you really want to make sure that you have a plan. And I think the important thing is for us to not think of this time as busy work for the rest of your class. You know, I think for so long, we have put our attention on the most important part of our instructional day a small group, because that’s really where we’re meeting our students needs are and small group is fun, and it serves its purpose.

But we have to remember that when we’re pulling a small group, the majority of our class really needs to be working on something that’s going to help those students grow as readers and writers.

Okay, so once you have your plan in place, and you’ve decided, You know what it is that you want your students to do, the next thing you need to do, and this is maybe the most important is you have to really train your students, you know, they have to build their independence.

So you want to make a plan for how are we going to train our students? I made the mistake of when I first started pulling small groups, I would you know, I ran through sort of, here’s center one here’s center two, the student is going here, these students are going there, I’m gonna pull a small group, everybody do their thing, don’t bother me. So I can teach the students ready, set go. And of course, it was like hectic and chaotic.

I think we we recognize that if we’re doing something like centers or workstations that requires a lot of moving parts, that that requires us to practice with our students and train our students. But I think even when we’re doing something like independent reading, or a teacher assigned task, whether it’s you know, fluency practice, or you know, they’re reading a passage or something, those things we have to also make sure we’re taking time to train our students.

And I know at the start of the year, especially when we start pulling in small groups, we feel like we just don’t have enough time to slow down. But this is a perfect example of why it is so important for us to slow down. So that way we can speed up later in the year.

You know, when we take the time to really slow down and train our students at the beginning of the year and not rush into things then later on in the year they are going to be very independent.

So when you think about training your students there are really four sort of areas that you want to consider. The first one is getting really clear with your students on what are the expectations for this time? So what are your expectations for movement? Volume level? Materials? What happens when students have a question? What happens if students finish early? What happens if students don’t finish everything in the allotted time?

You know, we really want to think through everything, and then make sure we communicate that to our students. Oftentimes, we have these these sort of expectations in our heads, and we kind of expect our students to read our minds. So we want to make sure that we go through this with our students. So whether you have a slide or a poster, make sure that your students understand your expectations, and that it is visual for them to see.

The other thing that you want to do is you want to think about how you can slowly build students stamina. So no matter what the activity is, we want to make sure that we’re building up student’s ability to be independent, slowly. I think a lot of times when we think of stamina, we associate it with independent reading. But again, regardless of what you’re doing, we want to take our time to build it slowly.

So if you’re doing something like centers or workstations, then you would introduce one center at a time, whole group, let every student practice that activity, until they become really proficient with it, then you would introduce and practice another, then you would practice doing the two activities in a rotation, then you’d bring in a third, and so on, and so on.

You know, if you’re doing something like independent reading, start with having students just read for, you know, maybe five to seven minutes, and then we’re going to slowly build in their time.

If you’re doing something like a teacher assigned task, then we also really want to think about, can we give our students a really short assignment, something that they can do kind of quickly and with competence, so that way, they feel like they can be successful with it. So we don’t want our first assignment to be something like a three page passage with 15 questions on it, because that’s going to be really overwhelming for them.

You know, I think sometimes we think we want to give our students more work. So we know they’ll be busy the whole time. So we can pull our small groups. But if we’re constantly giving our students this long, complex task that they’re never going to be able to finish, they’re really going to lose their motivation and their momentum to want to keep working. So we always want to start small, and then we want to build from there.

The third thing you want to make sure you do is practice, practice, practice, practice, practice, and practice some more. I think, you know, most of the time, teachers are really eager to get started with small groups, I know, the districts that I always taught, and we kind of had like a deadline, you know, you must be started with small groups by the third week of school, or you have to start before October 1, or whatever it is.

And so I know that there is pressure to get started, which I think, you know, we definitely want to get started with it. But you know, remember, if we rush this training process, then we run the risk of having our students who are not fully prepared for independence. And if that’s the case, then we’re going to have a lot more disruptions during our small group instruction.

So you know, take enough time to actually practice with your students, whether it is the stations, the independent reading, teacher assigned tasks, get them used to working independently, before you actually start pulling small groups.

And then the fourth thing that you really want to make sure you’re doing when you’re training your students is to provide feedback during this training phase. So you know, whatever expectation you set, so if you set a specific expectation around movement, you know, then you want to make sure that you’re providing positive and constructive feedback.

You know, so pointing out students who really followed the expectation, maybe showing some examples of okay, this expectation wasn’t met, make sure students know exactly what they’re doing well, and also give them gentle corrective feedback. So they know if they aren’t fully meeting the guidelines set.

You know, if we give expectations, but then we never refer back to them they’re kind of meaningless. And so we want to set the expectations and then give feedback as we’re practicing. So our students know again, what they’re doing well, and what they aren’t doing well.

Okay, the fourth thing that you can do to set your students up for success is to create a visual, that is going to communicate the expectations while you’re in small group. So I know I mentioned this in the previous step when I was talking about how we want to really train our students and set clear expectations.

But with those setting expectations, we want to have a visual so that way, when you are in small group, your students can visually see the expectations. You want there to be something that students can reference while you’re in small group. And you know, this visual could include the specific details of the assignment that they’re doing, it could include the center of rotation. But we also want it to include the behavioral expectations related to volume, movement, those types of things.

So here are some things that you might want to either create a visual for or include if you’re going to create like a slide or something. Maybe have like an essential agreements poster that has been signed by all of the students for your general behavior expectations. So that way, it’s very clear like this is what we’ve agreed to.

You could have a slide with the specific teacher assigned tasks. So if your students are supposed to read a specific article and complete a graphic organizer, it’s very clear. So they don’t have to ask what they’re working on. You know, have a poster chart or slide with your specific center rotation along with who is doing what, so if there’s any sort of partner work, you want to have that listed somewhere. And then if you have any sort of like choice board, whether it’s a made do or may not do list, list that there so students see all of their options.

But you also might want to consider, other than having a chart, right, or a poster or a slide, there are other ways that you can create visual cues that can communicate expectations. You know, a lot of it is helping your students be aware that when small groups are happening, our expectations or behavior is maybe different than a whole group lesson or another part of our day.

So some other things that you could consider doing to really just help reiterate the small group expectations are, you know, maybe you wear a hat, or a special set of glasses, while you’re in a small group that really lets your students know that they cannot interrupt you, when you’re playing small groups.

Maybe you play a specific playlist, maybe there’s some classical music that you play, you know, so your students know when this music is on, they are really working on becoming independent. You could do something like have a bell or a signal that you ring at the start of your small group lesson and at the end. You could even do something like have a light, a light or a lamp that you turn on during small group, and then you turn it off again, when it’s time to transition, things like that.

So again, just coming up with cues or like visual signals that are really going to remind students of the expectations that you have set for them when it’s time to pull small groups.

And then the final thing to do to really set your students up for success, when you’re pulling small groups is to begin pulling your small groups. But while you’re doing that, stop and provide corrective feedback as needed.

And, you know, I think we need to recognize if we’re going to be practicing and setting up schedules and training our students at some point, we are going to actually have to begin start pulling small groups, which is the whole goal. So that’s very exciting.

But it’s important to remember that even though your students might be fully trained, you might have practiced for weeks, they might know exactly what to do, there might be a visual on the board, we need to remember though, that at some point, they’re going to forget, at some point, there’s going to be mistake, you know, somebody’s not going to follow the expectations. And we still need to continue to provide corrective feedback.

And so one of the things that I think can be really great is to put in place a small group reflection time. And this could look a variety of ways you could do this as a whole group where at the end of the small group time you ask your students, you know, what do you guys think went well, what is something else that we can work on, you can reflect as a class, you could have students reflect individually, you could have them write on a sticky note or put something in their reading journal.

So there’s so many different ways that you can incorporate reflection, I think the important thing is, is that once we get small groups started, that’s not necessarily like the end goal, right? The end goal is that as we continue to pull small groups, our students continue to build in their independence. So that way, this time can really be an effective and productive part of your literacy block.

Okay, so to recap, five things that you can do to set your classroom up for small group success. First, have a plan for how much time you want to spend teaching your small groups, you’re going to think time and frequency. The second thing you’re going to do is to create a structure for what the rest of your class is going to be doing something like independent reading teacher assigned task literacy workstations.

The third thing you’re going to do is train your students remember to communicate those expectations and practice them. The fourth thing is to make sure that you have some sort of visual or you have a variety of visual cues to really communicate expectations while you’re in small groups. And then the fifth thing is is don’t forget to reflect and provide feedback throughout the year.

So I am wishing you nothing but stellar small group success this next year. Don’t forget, think about these things now as you are preparing for back to school. And then of course, once it comes time to pull your small groups you will be set up you’ll know exactly how you want to structure that time, and it will be a very smooth part of your classroom this year. I hope you have a stellar week and I will see you back here next Monday.