perspectives in Education and Deafness

Guided Reading & Writing

Learning How to Learn

Guided Reading & Writing

Students respond to text in open-ended and personal ways at their instructional level. Work on developing fluency and confidence with reading strategies, and develop insights into theme, style, divergent opinion, and various forms of literature.

"The teacher must be able to design a superbly sequenced program determined by the child's performance, and make highly skilled decisions moment by moment during the lesson," writes one leading researcher (Clay, 1993).

Guided reading and writing occur when the teacher guides students in discussing and exploring the reading process so that students can develop literacy skills, and later apply what they learn when they read and write independently. In my classroom, there is a list of strategies that students are encouraged to use when they struggle with reading. At the beginning of the school year, only a handful of suggestions, based on what the students can do, are listed. As the year progresses, more strategies are added as students' skills and experience expand. A chart listing these strategies is always displayed in the classroom. (See Our Reading Strategies below)

	ABOVE: With the letter displayed on chart paper, students underline the words that they do not understand. Photos courtesy of Stephanie Malik.

How It Works
Choosing the Text

Literature books, textbooks from content areas, and teacher-written material can be used for guided reading. This ensures that students will be able to apply reading strategies to a variety of materials. Literature books, particularly big books, are useful for group discussion among emergent readers because the print is large and often the text is supported by an accompanying picture. In choosing literature books, it is important to use books in which text is supportive from one statement or paragraph to the next. Although literature books offer wonderful examples of different genres, it is necessary to be cautious. Readers who are not skilled will experience a breakdown in comprehension if the text contains insufficient supports in grammatical, semantic or structural cues.

	ABOVE: The author discusses the letter with a student who holds the list of reading strategies in his hand. With use, the strategies become internalized.

For example, my fifth graders read, on average, at the second grade level. Their science book was written for the average fifth grade reader. Guided reading is essential to help my students comprehend such a challenging text. When we read books such as this, we apply a second set of strategies that are continuously addressed in the classroom. These include:

• Read the heading
• Look at the bold print
• Look at the italicized print
• Read the captions
• Discuss with a partner what you think these things mean

A Morning Letter

There is another kind of text for guided reading, which I use each morning. It is a letter written on chart paper describing the events of the day. The letter is displayed in the front of the classroom. I write the letter myself in order to provide text that supports the development of reading strategies. The text in the letter relates to the students' daily events. As one researcher notes, "making meaning means making connections with experience" (Johnston, 1997). The morning letter enables the teacher to select specific vocabulary and sentence structures, and to write a passage that requires students to use their previous knowledge to decode the print. Students read the letter individually, underlining unfamiliar text and using their individual strategy list to help them decode the meaning.

Students' Role

"The expectations for retelling help students understand that they are accountable for reading, not word calling (saying or signing each word without meaning)" (Malik, 1996).

Each day students are encouraged to demonstrate for the group their use of strategies for the unfamiliar text they have underlined in the morning letter. Students discuss the rationale and appropriateness of choosing particular strategies. On some occasions, they ask appropriate guiding questions of each other. Finally students are required to summarize the main message in the text without memorizing each word. The success of this kind of lesson is dependent on maintaining a risk-free environment for students. The main objective is for the students to become aware of what they need to be thinking while they read.

ABOVE: A large part of guided reading is talking about reading.

	ABOVE: Students work together with the overhead.

Teacher's Role

A large part of guided reading is talking about reading, and the teacher's role is to maintain the class conversation. Occasionally some modeling of the use of reading strategies is necessary, but most of the time the teacher's role is to invoke students' responses based on their own thoughts and opinions about the reading process. A passive learner will not benefit from an instructor's modeling as much as he or she will from active participation. In time, students learn to independently ask themselves these same questions and eventually internalize strategies; self-monitoring becomes automatic.

See Also:
Guided Reading-A Sample Lesson
Guided Writing-A Sample Lesson
Editing and Rivision Checklist (26.6k graphic)