A First-Grade Teacher Searches for a Way to Group Her Students for Reading Instruction
Janet Roberts sits at her desk on an early October afternoon, observing her students as they prepare to go home for the day. This year’s class is perhaps the most diverse group of students she has taught in her four years in the profession. Her class is balanced in terms of gender and mixed in terms of ethnicity and race. Eleven of her students are black, nine are Latino, and five are white. She has worked hard to build community in her room, especially since noticing that her students tend to cluster by gender and race on the playground, in the cafeteria, and in class.
In a recent grade-level planning meeting with her principal and the school’s literacy coach, Janet was reminded of her school’s annual struggle to meet adequate yearly progress (AYP). While reading achievement is improving overall, a significant number of minority students continue to lag behind their peers.
Janet’s principal discussed the district mandate for small group instruction and outlined a plan for moving in that direction at every grade level. The school’s literacy coach then presented the results of the most recent first-grade benchmark reading assessments.
Looking at the data from her classroom, Janet asked her grade-level colleagues, “Are your students this low, too, or is it just my class?” This led to a conversation about why so many of their students struggle with reading.
“Well, most of these kids are our ‘apartment kids,’” one colleague noticed. Another said, “Look what we have to start with; a lot of these kids don’t know the alphabet yet.” And another stated, “We’ve got some of the ELL kids in here, too; they don’t have much language.”
The literacy coach suggested that his colleagues “set aside where these kids come from and focus on what they need." He recommended that each teacher create groups based on the benchmark text levels.
With the coach’s help, Janet created five guided-reading groups. But when Janet inspected the groups that day, she thought she detected a problem.
Watching her students line up at the door for dismissal that October afternoon, she wonders if this approach to grouping her students was going to work.
Next Step > Explore Your First Impression
