Small Group Instruction- Moving Learners Forward 20 minutes at a Time

As an instructional coach, I find myself telling teachers, “If you are running low on time and have only enough minutes left for either a whole class lesson or small group instruction, always choose small group.”

This is because so much happens at “the table”.  When we have a homogeneous small group of readers or mathematicians as a captive audience, the purpose of our time together is to literally move learners forward in 20 minutes.  There is a feeling of intensity and purpose when we are working with a small group.  Because we choose texts, skills, or strategies that are purposefully at a student’s “cutting edge” of learning, we actually move learners forward every time we meet!     

To help make our time at the table matter, we have to be intentional as we introduce them.  I love explaining to my students the difference between the independent work that they are doing during our reading block, and the work that happens in small group. Stations, independent reading, and response to reading are awesome opportunities to think about their thinking and to practice what they know.  In contrast, I tell students that they should not know all of the answers during small group time. Kids should be grappling and understand the importance of the work.  This is not a time for practice, but instead a time that is intentionally focused on individual learning.  I explain what it means to be working at the cutting edge of your knowledge and we talk about how that feels.  I always tell them that they should be sweating when they leave!

My work at the table is different too.  I am a facilitator, a pusher, a challenger.  I do not impart much information or even share much of my thinking when I am with a small group.  My job is to question, to rephrase my questions, to give LOTS of wait time, and to create opportunities for students to improve as a reader.  My favorite question at the end of a small group session is, “So, what do you know now that you didn’t know 20 minutes ago?”  Don’t be afraid to ask this.  It brings accountability to the table, both theirs and yours. 

The last way to insure that our time is spent purposefully and intentionally is to take the best anecdotal records possible of the magic happening at the table. How can we possibly let this time just happen without capturing the learning that is taking place?  How will we know the best thing to do tomorrow if we haven’t been intentional in our collection of what happened today?  Let’s face it, we are teaching all day long, dealing with a million things by lunchtime, if we don’t write down what happened, we will not remember what one student did, or what we did to help him/her. 

As our school moved through the process of improving our anecdotal note forms in both math and reading last year, our whole staff worked together to streamline the process and to pack as much information about our check-ins with kiddos as possible.  One great idea that we added to our form is a T  P  R  inside each square.  These letters stand for Teaching, Prompting and Reinforcing.  Each time we write down a student behavior, we circle one of the letters so that we not only capture what our students are doing, we also record how much of us (the teacher) was required for the students to show what they know. 

It's an exciting time of the year in our schools! Teachers and students are settling in to procedures, and schedules, and to each other.  The beginning of the year data has been collected, the individual student conferences have taken place, and we are ready to take on the most exciting work that we do.  It’s small group time!  Teach!  Indiana!!