Building a Toolkit to Support Small Group Instruction in Reading and Writing

Date: Tuesday, December 10, 2024

Time: 11:00 AM - 3:00 PM ET

Location: Online, via Zoom

Led by: Rebecca Cronin

Who Should Attend: Grades K-2 teachers and coaches

Cost: $150 per person

The consensus is clear–small group instruction is essential. Having said that, we recognize that the press to lead small groups every day asks a lot of you. It is already a lot for a teacher to plan what a classful of kids will be doing everyday for the duration of a Unit; expecting teachers to then spend evenings, on top of an already hefty workload, planning small groups for every subset of kids is an even more considerable demand. You’ll come away from this day with an armload of small groups that you can teach easily, with clear goals in mind. 

This session will help you learn half a dozen especially high leverage and easy-to-lead small groups that you can be ready to lead at an instant’s notice. You’ll watch videos of those small groups, learn ways to easily alter them so the same small group helps kids at different levels, and you’ll hear tips for how to pull these off efficiently and with power. 

One huge part of this work will be devoting an hour to support you as you develop a toolkit of resources that you can keep close at hand as you teach. The good news is that you won’t need to invent those tools; you simply need to locate these tools among all the online resources and then press play. You’ll learn to mine Supporting All Readers, the sister Supporting All Writers book, the Online Resources, the Writing Pathways book and your students’ data. You will discover ways to mine these resources to build yourself a toolkit that can be “at-the-ready,” 

Across this day expect to:

• Work to identify the key skills in each Unit of Study, coming to understand where to focus supportive instruction for students.

• Mine Units of Study for the most impactful small groups to support readers and writers across the units, supporting identified key skills.

• Think about the data you collect and how to use it to identify which small groups will be most supportive to have planned and ready to go.

• Identify the resources necessary to support students in developing identified key skills, including anchor charts, one time charts, mentor texts, and other visual supports.

• Think about ways to work as a team to prepare tools and store them for ongoing use across time, including developing options for printing, storing, finding books to use, and more.

• Learn to write exemplar texts to support students in developing writing skills and identify the components needed to support the writing progression, thinking of structure, and how to mark a text to provide the best support.

• Work together with others to determine other important tools needed to support students in this high leverage work, such as identifying resources from phonics or phonological awareness curricula that could be brought into the reading and writing workshop.

• Learn how to effectively scaffold, and then remove those scaffolds, for students within a small group so that students continue to work with growing independence.

• Consider ways to use the tools you make and make use of tools that are naturally in your classroom during a small group or conference. Also consider which tools you might make available to students to have on an ongoing basis in their book bags or writing folders.

• Walk away with ideas for a toolkit for the upcoming units of study and a plan for creating future toolkits