Larry Ferlazzo is an English and social studies teacher at Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento, Calif.
The new question-of-the-week is:
What are your recommendations for how best to set up and organize small groups in classroom instruction?
In Part One , Valentina Gonzalez, Olivia Montero Petraglia, Jenny Vo, and Jennifer Mitchell provided their suggestions.
In Part Two , Irina McGrath, Ph.D., Cindy Garcia, and Serena Pariser offered their commentaries.
Today, Julia Stearns Cloat, Nancy Garrity, Laura Smith, Christina Krantz, and Luiza Mureseanu share their ideas.
Julia Stearns Cloat has spent the past 25 years working in unit school districts in roles related to literacy, MTSS, professional learning, and curriculum development. She currently works as the executive director of curriculum and instruction in Freeport, Ill., and as an adjunct professor at Northern Illinois University. Julia has co-authored her first book, Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Reading Practices: A Leveling System for Authentic Spanish Instruction, which will come out in next year:
Students returned to the classrooms this fall with inconsistent learning experiences and a range of proficiency levels that exceeds those of a typical school year. There is a significant need to target and differentiate learning, making effective small-group instruction more important than ever. Three key elements to consider when designing and organizing small-group classroom instruction are:
Gradual Release of Responsibility to Design Instructional Time: Using a gradual release of responsibility design for lessons will help teachers to structure instructional time in a way that provides students with the opportunity to learn and collaborate and teachers with the opportunity to observe and assess learning. While it is certainly not a new concept, the gradual release of responsibility is a crucial element to designing classroom instruction. As teachers and students return to fully in-person instruction, maximizing every instructional moment will be more important than ever, and effective instructional moves can take place at each phase of the gradual release.
A well-designed lesson that is gradually released benefits students through opportunities to apply new learning. It allows the teacher to observe peer interaction and to assess individual student proficiency of the new learning. It is recommended that between the third and fourth phase, teachers take advantage of on-the-spot assessment to formulate informal small group(s) of students. For example, a teacher who has observed students sharing misconceptions during peer collaboration could gather the students together as a small group. The teacher would then briefly and explicitly reteach the concept, check for understanding, provide targeted and actionable feedback, and then release the students to work independently. This extra layer of small-group instruction before the learning task increases the likelihood that students, who may have otherwise held on to misconceptions, will experience success.
Personalized Learning Plans to Build Relationships & Organize Small Groups: Personalized learning plans will be a useful tool for teachers in the postpandemic learning environment to get to know their students, support the social-emotional needs of the students, and to form small groups. PLPs are completed with the teacher and student working together, which helps to build relationships and puts the student at the center of learning. Students who are able will write about their interests on the PLP. Then the teacher and student will meet together to set goals and review the student’s interests. The PLPs then can be used to build small groups based on learning goals or student interest.
For example, in an ELA classroom, the teacher may review the writing goals on the PLPs to form small groups of students with the same or similar goals. Then during class, the teacher provides direct instruction to small groups of students with the same goals as the other students are writing independently. Alternatively, the ELA teacher may look at the interests of the students to create small groups of students with the same or similar interests to work on a research project or nonfiction pieces about a given topic.
There are many PLPs to choose from online. The PLP created by the State of Vermont Agency of Education has a simple format, is easy to use, and is beneficial when building relationships at the beginning of the year.
Formative Assessments for Organizing Students Into Small Groups: Formative assessments are crucial to organizing and planning for small-group instruction. Much has been written about formative assessments as tools for monitoring student learning and to provide ongoing feedback, but they are also an absolutely critical tool when forming small groups. There are limitless examples of formative assessments that can be used for grouping students based on their proficiencies toward a learning target. Common examples include using running records to establish guided-reading groups, word-study tests to establish strategy skills groups that focus on specific phonics skills, or exit slips to create guided-math groups. The key to assessing formatively is not the assessment itself but what is done with the information once it is gathered.
