Inspiring ideas on guided reading

If you loathe guided reading, Rachel Clarke and Charlotte Reed’s excellent and inspiring ideas on the subject might just change your mind...

If there’s one thing we’re asked about more than any other, it’s guided reading. When is it best taught? How much planning do I need to do? What are the best texts? How can I improve my questioning? The list goes on.

Whether you love it or loathe it, guided reading is probably the most well-used strategy for teaching reading in British primary schools. It may not get a specific mention in the new national curriculum, but the document divides the act of reading into ‘word reading’ and ‘comprehension’, and asserts that “Comprehension skills develop through pupils’ experience of high-quality discussion with the teacher, as well as from reading and discussing a range of stories, poems and non-fiction”. As such – as far as we can see – guided reading is destined to maintain its popularity as the main approach for teaching reading comprehension.

As advocates for guided reading, we feel a sense of duty to spread the word and get everyone thinking about how to get the most out of this approach, which brings us to the following ideas that can be used to inspire and support its continued use.

* Protect it

If you’re wavering on the loathe it side of the guided reading debate, here’s a little thought about the value it can bring to you and your pupils. Have you ever calculated how many minutes per day you spend with each child in your class? Pause for a moment: take a school day and divide it by 30 children; minus lesson introductions; subtract registration; take away playtime; carry a few over and reduce the sum by a lunchtime. It’s not much, is it? Guided reading ensures every child gets 20 ring-fenced minutes with you, every week of the year. Protecting this precious time requires careful planning and goes some way to answering the question of when in the day guided reading should be taught. Put it immediately after lunch and you can guarantee that lost sweatshirts, grazed knees and football disputes will eat into your reading session. Likewise, put it on a Friday after the awards assembly and you can rest assured you’ll only have five minutes before the bell goes for play. Making the most of your guided reading session means choosing a time that won’t slip away.

* KISS

What about the amount of planning required for a good guided reading session? Our answer is – not very much. This really isn’t intended as a flippant response. Guided reading is a mini-lesson, which means you need a minimal amount of content and planning to support it. We frequently remind teachers to apply the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) principle to their guided reading. By this we mean you should concentrate on one Assessment Focus (AF), don’t spend ages planning, and don’t feel the pressure to load every guided reading session with tonnes of whizzy teaching tricks. Stick to your focused learning intention, ask questions about this focus and make it the subject of your assessment, too. You’ll still encounter unplanned opportunities to visit other AFs, but your lesson will have a much clearer learning intention.

* Get equal

Do you struggle to get the children active enough during the guided reading session? Finding ways to alter the pupil-teacher relationship can have a really positive impact. Ask yourself this question: “Who’s working hardest in guided reading sessions?”If the answer is you, then you need to take action. Now. Try getting the children to ask questions of you and their peers during the session. Invest time in making some question stems and teach the children how to use these to ask questions about a text. The small group size used for guided reading makes it a perfect place for you and the children to experiment with developing a more dialogic approach to teaching and learning. (For more information about dialogic approaches to teaching and learning, we recommend Neil Mercer’s Words and Minds, Routledge.) Provide the oldest children and the most fluent readers with time to read the text before coming to the guided reading session. Then when you come together, try running the session more like a book group, with the children discussing and analysing the text. This strategy requires practice but, once mastered, you won’t look back.

* Shake up the questioning

We’ve taught and observed a lot of guided reading sessions, which means we’ve heard a lot of questions. We haven’t, though, heard so many statements. This is where you take a question, phrase it as a statement and ask the children whether they agree or disagree. Your statements could look something like this:

* “This is a non-chronological report. Agree or disagree?”

* “Goldilocks was a criminal. Agree or disagree?”

What’s important about this type of questioning is not the ‘agree or disagree’ statement made by the children, but how they justify their opinions through reference to what they know from the text, or their knowledge of different text types. It’s this that makes it so versatile with children of all abilities and ages. For example, a child working at level 1 may tell you Goldilocks was a criminal because she broke into the three bears’ home. Whereas a child working at level 5 may tell you about a variety of text, sentence and word-level features that ensure the text couldn’t possibly be a non- chronological report, but is instead an explanation. Critical thinking is central in this approach and the small group size used for guided reading means using statements can provide children with a context for discussion and debate. For further ideas for alternative approaches to questioning, we recommend Shirley Clarke’s book, Active Learning Through formative Assessment (2008, Hodder Education).

* Inspire them

Reading a dull book is bad. Reading a dull book, discussing it with your teacher and then having to write about it is even worse. The best texts for guided reading are the ones you and the children enjoy. There are some fabulous commercial guided reading schemes available, which are great for teachers new to guided reading, or those lacking confidence in how to formulate their own questions on texts. ‘Real books’, though, provide children with exposure to texts they would not often choose themselves. Good quality books have a richness of vocabulary that not only engages children as readers, but stimulates their writing too.

We’re not pretending that guided reading is easy. It isn’t. Done well, though, it is a successful way to teach reading comprehension to children. We hope that we’ve given you a few ideas to try out in your guided reading sessions. We also hope that you’ve contracted our enthusiasm for guided reading. We love guided reading. Not just because it’s a great place to learn about reading comprehension, but because it’s a place to learn about asking questions; a place to offer and justify opinions; a place to build answers as a group; a place to spend some quality time with your teacher; and a place to learn how to love literature.

About the authors

Rachel Clarke and Charlotte Reed are the directors of Primary English, an independent consultancy working with schools to raise standards in literacy. Visit them at primaryenglished.co.uk or on Twitter @PrimaryEnglish.

Put them in the picture

Whilst reading longer texts is important, especially for children in the final years of KS2, we shouldn’t neglect good-quality picture books. Picture books can have narrative depth that transcends words alone. How authors choose and use words for effect in these shorter narratives, whether alone or in combination with visual images, can inspire fascinating guided reading sessions. Picture books also frequently offer us opportunities to explore more challenging themes in a ‘child-friendly’ manner. By doing this, we can use reading as a way to engage children with complex emotions, issues for debate and ideas they may otherwise not encounter. We frequently use picture books from the Kate Greenaway Medal website as these have passed the strict judging criteria used in the award (carnegiegreenaway.org.uk/greenaway).