Guided Reading: Strategies for the Differentiated Classroom

Lesson 1

Building a Balanced Literary Framework

If you have you ever wished you had a good way to reach your struggling readers, you're ready to transform reading instruction with differentiated instruction and guided reading. In this lesson, you will discover how blending these techniques will help you build a balanced literary framework.

Getting to Know Your Readers

The first step in helping your students is getting to know who they are and how their minds work. In this lesson, you will learn how to evaluate your students' readiness, interests, learning profiles, and social elements.

Planning Assessments

Assessment is at the heart of differentiated instruction. In this lesson, learn how to plan quality pre-, ongoing, and summative assessments that will give you a clear picture of student learning. The best part of assessing students at multiple intervals is that you can tell what is working and what isn't.

Grouping Students

In this lesson, you will discuss flexible groups. These are a mainstay in the differentiated classroom because they allow you to combine students for different reasons on different days. Sometimes you will combine students based on interests and other times based on readiness or learning profile.

Selecting Texts

There are thousands of options when it comes to selecting the texts you will teach. This lesson will teach you how narrow down your options by understanding the criteria of good fiction and nonfiction texts.

Framing Your Prereading

Did you know that a lot of the learning process hinges on what you do to prepare students before they start reading? It's easy to just introduce a text and let students have at it, but if you plan the time before reading with activities that build anticipation, you will be amazed by the results.

Reading the Text

How students read a text is a highly personal matter, but in the classroom, you must direct their reading to get the greatest results. In this lesson, you will learn how to teach students the right way to read, to comprehend what they've just read, and to make inferences.

Navigating the After Reading Framework

This lesson covers the after-reading framework, where you will teach students to turn information into ideas as they go beyond the text and into the world.

Tiering With Ease

If you think of your classroom as a ladder, you will realize that you have a lot of students on a lot of different rungs. In this lesson you will explore tiering, which helps you separate students based on their readiness, interests, or learning profiles.

Anchoring Your Students to Extra Learning

What do you do with those extra 10 or 15 minutes at the end of a lesson or a school day? An increasingly popular strategy is to anchor your students to the material they've learned by extending learning in new avenues.

Crafting Independent Reading Projects

The ultimate goal of the balanced literary framework is to create independent readers. In this lesson, you will learn the basics of curriculum compacting, learning contracts, and individual projects, all of which will help your students transition to independence.

Putting the Puzzle Together

This lesson wraps up the course by reviewing the foundation that you build for classroom learning. Your attitude is everything. Beyond that, you need to be able to encourage struggling readers and help parents extend the learning at home.