Leveling Students and Organizing Groups

    At the beginning of the year most of our teachers tried a leveling assessment called DRA. We found that this really did not accurately tell us where our students should be placed. Once the groups were established and we had worked with the groups for a few weeks, we found ourselves changing groups based on how the students actually performed. One difference of the Guided Reading approach compared with the traditional reading groups of twenty years ago is that the groups are flexible and can continue to change. This is because the goal is to have each student working at his or her instructional level. We want to provide a 90% success rate with a 10% challenge to help the students improve their reading decoding. Comprehension should be at 80%. If a child is no longer being challenged or is working at too high of a level, then he or she should be placed in a different group working at an appropriate level. Groups can also be organized heterogeneously if, for example, all the kids have an interest in a particular topic. Heterogeneous groups work well with other small group activities such as Reader's Theater and themes such as Poetry.

    One benefit of the entire K-5 school using a Guided Reading approach is that next year we will already know what level our students are working at. We can have our students do a quick read at the beginning of the school year using a book at the level they were using the year before.