INTRODUCTION

“The exciting romance with guided reading is well underway.”

Fountas and Pinnell, 2012

During the summer of 2014, I was invited to present at a professional development conference in Las Vegas. The conference attracted more than 6,000 educators, and many joined a tract I presented for called “I Teach First Grade.” While I was asked to present on what I thought were three contemporary hot topics, such as helping students handle complex texts, integrating nonfiction in literacy programs, and using accessible assessments to document the progress of learners, a session I conducted entitled “Guided Reading: What’s New?” drew the largest number of educators—almost four times as many as the others.

It surprised me that so many educators were still interested in learning more about guided reading. In an era of constantly identifying what’s hot and what’s not, I thought guided reading had been pushed to the back burner. It seems to be the focus of minimal scholarly attention, but it still dominates literacy programs, especially primary classrooms. In fact, in these times of increasing demands from Response to Intervention (RtI) frameworks and college and career readiness standards, small group instruction including guided reading is now carrying the responsibility of providing interventions to accelerate the growth of all readers. Models of small group reading instruction seem particularly critical for readers who need our help the most.

While models of guided reading have existed for many decades, they re-emerged in 1996 with the popularity of Fountas and Pinnell’s text Guided Reading: Good First Teaching for All Children. Ranked first by relevance in a Google search on “guided reading” and cited more than 1,000 times, it is clear this is the most influential resource in shaping what we now know as guided reading. A number of how-to resource books emerged subsequently to support teachers. One of those was a text I co-authored with Michael F. Opitz (2001) called Reaching Readers: Flexible and Innovative Strategies for Guided Reading, written in part to expand the vision of guided reading and to encourage teachers to break out of an orthodoxy that had developed around the practice. Since that time, less has been written about guided reading. The Next Step in Guided Reading by Jan Richardson was published in 2009 and has been embraced by many educators looking for more direction. Preventing Misguided Reading by Burkins and Kroft has a more recent publication date (2010) and offers a more critical view of the practice. In their observations, they warned:

Misinterpreted instructional methods run the risk of abandonment. Education is littered with the remains of educational trends lost in translation. Often, the reality is that we compromised the fidelity of their implementation. So, critics assemble and declare that the approach doesn’t work, as researchers and publishers line up to set a new program in place. We see this trend surfacing with guided reading, and we lament the energy and resources that districts may expend in totally revamping literacy instruction that may simply need adjusting (xv).

Perhaps the time does seem right to refocus some attention on improving small group instruction including guided reading within current literacy programs. When I prepared my presentation for the summer conference, I organized it around seven key guidelines to frame not only what was new in guided reading but, more important, what was working and what needed to be improved. The content was positively received by the audience and indicated to me an existing need to help educators look critically at this practice that has had almost two decades of implementation. So when Karen Soll from Capstone Professional approached me about doing a new book, I suggested looking at guided reading and thinking about how to position it for a more productive role in today’s literacy programs.

That discussion led to this book. Although this teacher resource book is grounded in critical theory, research, and issues, I focus primarily on practical ideas to improve small group instruction, including guided reading within literacy programs. It is framed around seven key questions, and each chapter answers each by presenting a discussion of the issues and illustrating practical ideas educators can implement within their literacy programs. Reproducible forms and support materials are also available to readers within the chapters and in the Appendices.

The seven key questions that frame each of the chapters are:

1. Chapter One: Where Have We Been, and Where Are We with Guided Reading Practices?
   This chapter builds on research about the history of guided reading that Michael Opitz and I did for the chapter “Guided Reading: Now and Then” in Mary Jo Fresch’s book An Essential History of Current Reading Practices published in 2008 by the International Reading Association. A version of this chapter was also published as the article “Looking Back to Move Forward with Guided Reading” in the journal Reading Horizons in 2011. To look ahead, the chapter presents results from a national survey of guided reading practices Opitz and I conducted that was published in Literacy Research and Instruction in 2008 as an article called “A National Survey of Guided Reading Practices: What We Can Learn from Primary Teachers.”
2. Chapter Two: Why Is Guided Reading Still Important? What Is the Purpose of Guided Reading?
   When the conversation in the reading community shifts to new topics, or at least new ways of talking about old topics, it is important that we don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater. In this chapter, I will provide the theory and research supporting the use of guided reading. It is important to be able to articulate why guided reading is still relevant in literacy programs. This chapter also includes suggestions for an assessment, which can be used as a baseline.
3. Chapter Three: How Does Guided Reading Fit into the Rest of the Literacy Program?
   Often, guided reading is relied on to carry the responsibility of addressing all instructional needs for the students that it serves. Exclusively using or over relying on guided reading in this manner will result in an imbalanced comprehensive literacy program, and the instruction will fall short of what it needs to do. Guided reading needs to be supported by other aspects of the literacy program. This chapter discusses how to better align guided reading within a comprehensive literacy program.
4. Chapter Four: How Should Texts Be Selected for Guided Reading?
   In looking at issues and ideas for using texts during guided reading for this chapter, I revisited work that I conducted with Kathryn Glasswell. This work was first published in The Reading Teacher in 2010 in the article “Teaching Flexibly with Leveled Texts: Bringing More Power to Your Reading Block,” and related work was published in the article “Let’s Start Leveling about Leveling” in Language Arts in 2011. I also provide a review of some guided reading programs commercially available.
5. Chapter Five: How Do We Support Different Types of Learners During Guided Reading?
   In this chapter, I look at a number of sources to discuss ways of structuring the guided reading sessions for different types of learners. I avoid presenting one right way to structure the lesson for all learners. Conversely, I recommend different formats to consider when planning and conducting effective sessions that support different learners and different purposes.
6. Chapter Six: What Is the Rest of the Class Doing During Guided Reading?
   This question has been a focus of my attention since first writing about guided reading with Michael Opitz in 2001 in our book Reaching Readers: Flexible and Innovative Strategies for Guided Reading with a chapter focused on “Organization and Management.” We wrote two articles for The Reading Teacher on independent work away from the teachers: “What Do I Do with the Rest of the Kids? Ideas for Meaningful Independent Activities During Small Group Guided Reading” (2004) and “Using Centers to Engage Children During Guided Reading Time: Intensifying Learning Experiences Away from the Teacher” (2002). This work informed my thinking as I wrote Chapter Six.
7. Chapter Seven: How Is Guided Reading Positioned for Intervention?
   If there is one area that has quickly surfaced in the discussion of guided reading since the first generation of resources emerged, it is the role of guided reading in RtI frameworks. The final chapter includes information on what guided reading looks like when it is not just used as universal class instruction but as an additional layer for intervention.

I hope that K–5 classroom teachers and those individuals who support K−5 literacy instruction (including but not limited to reading teachers, special education teachers, interventionists, coaches, and/or administrators) will find this to be a valuable resource. Teachers can use it to individually direct their professional development or position it for professional development across a group of educators.

It’s time to look at guided reading. What’s new, and what’s next?