In my upper grade seminars I've been giving a handout of a lesson developed by a teacher who truly understands what Guided Reading Block is all about. There are several impressive things about her lesson. Let me share those:

First, the text she used for the lesson is just one page! The use of short text is all too rare at upper grades where so many teachers think that the higher the grade, the longer the text must be that is used for instructional purposes. In fact, there are many upper grade teachers who feel that the text should all be novel-length. Please keep in mind that we aren't trying to raise novel readers in our classes, although that we be a great by-product of getting students hooked on reading in our Self-Selected Reading Block. We should use an occasional novel, but we should not use novels exclusively. Many teachers defend their practice of moving from novel to novel to novel by saying that students have to learn to attend to longer text and that longer text is what they'll be faced with in high school or college. The sustained reading over multiple days, however, is encouraged during Self-Selected Reading Block and should not be necessary on a regular basis in Guided Reading Block. (Although this lesson was just one page, I certainly don't mean to communicate that all Guided Reading lessons be built around this slight amount of text.)

Second, the text this teacher used was related to science content. This is particularly useful in Guided Reading because we must include a great deal of non-fiction and informational text in our instruction. One good reason to use material from content areas of science, social studies, health, and others is what research reveals about most of our assessment programs. Research reveals that at least 60% of the text on our standardized tests is non-fiction/informational. How foolish it would be to ignore this genre in our instruction! Most of us would agree that students feel far more comfortable with narrative fiction than with any type of informational text. We need to teach them more about how informational text is organized and the strategies necessary for comprehending it.

Third, this teacher planned three days of lessons around one page of text! Wow! How did she get this much mileage out of such a short amount of text? She had her students reading for totally different reasons each day. On day one, her lesson dealt with comparing and contrasting the information found in the text. She taught her minilesson and then asked students to read the text and apply what they had just learned. On day two, she taught how and why the text was organized into headings and subheading. She included predicting the kind of information in each section and how the information related from subheading to subheading. Again, students read and applied what they had learned. The third day, the teacher taught a minilesson on summarizing the information, using the organizational elements taught in the day-two lesson (heading, sub-headings). So, the three-day lesson included three different skills and much re-reading of the short text.

The fourth reason why I feel that this small lesson is such a perfect design is that I think students will begin to understand the true purpose of Guided Reading the Four-Blocks way. In my previous articles, I've mentioned numerous times the analogy of Four-Blocks Guided Reading being all about "how to fish" rather than the "fish" itself. From the parable in the Bible, instead of giving a hungry man a fish that would take care of his immediate needs, he's instead taught how to fish so that he'll have a lifelong skill that will prevent him from ever going hungry again. Our Guided Reading has a similar principle: Instead of stressing the story/text (the fish), we teach students how to read the text (how to fish) so that they'll have this skill will be life-long. I think in this lesson the students will "get it". They'll realize that they're indeed still learning to read as well as reading to learn.

Now, the true litmus test of a successful guided reading lesson should be asking this question of your students when the block comes to an end: "What did you learn today that will make you better readers?" If they answer by retelling or summarizing the text, I'm not sure you've been successful. If their responses include something about the skill or strategy, then I think you can count your guided reading lesson a great success!

If you're writing a grant at this time, I'll be happy to write a letter of support for your grant to promise good training, either by me or by one of the wonderful folks who works along with me through ERG. Email me directly at cmsigmon@aol.com or call 803-799-8024.

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Hope to see you at a seminar soon!