I’ve been teaching literacy in a 4th grade class this first quarter and having a blast! For an hour and a half each morning, I hop over to Susie’s room while she supports another teacher in math. After fall break, I’ll be going back to full day coaching, but I’m so glad I was able to dip my toes back into the teaching waters. It helped me reconnect to the work I’m coaching teachers on and rebuild my street cred.

Anyhow, part of that 90 minutes involved supporting a few groups of kids with differentiated literacy instruction using the structure of guided reading. Because you may be thinking about adjusting or freshening up your guided reading system {or supporting coachees with this} for the second quarter, I thought I’d share a few tips and resources for how I plan for guided reading.

1. Organize Your Data

You’ll be grouping students primarily by their reading level and you’ll want a way to track their growth throughout the year and adjust your instruction accordingly. Beth Newingham is one of my hero teachers who I’ve been following and learning from for a long time. This is a tool she offers teachers on her website that I’ve always used and love.

Click Here to Download

2. Form Your Groups and Schedule

I’ve found I’m most successful and efficient with my instructional time when I have up to five reading groups, although six is doable. Above that though is really pushing it. I like to use a planning template such as the one below to help me plan when and how often I’ll meet with each group.

Click Here to Download

3. Create a Planning Template {or use mine!}

Planning templates are a bit like good checklists in that they help you attend to all the important components of a lesson without having to drain any mental energy remembering what they are. Which in turn improves your planning efficiency! This is the one I most commonly use, although here is a link to another one made specifically for working with Transitional readers if you’d like to check it out too.

Click Here to Download

4.  Grab a Binder

Now that you have your progress tracking sheet, weekly schedule sheet, and planning template it’s time to pop it all into a handy binder. With a nice cover of course, which I’ve included as a free download for you here.

Dividers with pockets work well for keeping everything organized. You can label your dividers by group or by student.

5. Select Your Books

I like to have all of my guided reading texts for the week selected the week before and placed in a bin so they’re ready to go.

{image via Scholastic}

And finally…

Let’s get to teaching!

Phew! I feel like I blinked and it was suddenly September. It has been one busy start to the school year. If I gave you a copy of my calendar for this past month and asked you to look for trends, I’d bet you would quickly find one word popping up all over the place…meeting. PD planning meetings, coaching meetings, team meetings…meetings, meetings, meetings. No doubt about it, the beginning of the year is prime meeting time. But as coaches, the reality is that beginning of the school year or not, meetings are just a part of what we do. So if that’s the deal, then let’s make sure we do those meetings well. To start, I’ll share three of my top tips for effectively facilitating a meeting then a few tools to support you as a facilitator or meeting participant.

Clarify Norms

Setting or clarifying norms for collaborative work is an important first step in supporting teams who will work together for a period of time. If you’re supporting grade level team meetings or just starting off a new coaching cycle, this would be a great place to start. When setting norms a few things to think about include logistics, timeliness, equal participation, and the decision making process. Create your meeting norms together and come back to them frequently.

Create an Agenda

Agenda, agenda, agenda! This is your lesson plan for the meeting. Just like you wouldn’t want a teacher to head into a lesson without a plan, you don’t want to head into a meeting without an agenda. Include clear outcomes, any materials needed, topics of discussion, and times attached to topics. Post the agenda for others to see and review it at the start of the meeting so everyone knows where they’re headed. Provide the opportunity for meeting members to ask questions or add in topics they would like to be addressed. Even if I’m only meeting with one other teacher, I always have an agenda.

Identify Next Steps

Never let the meeting come to a close before identifying next steps. Who will be responsible for what and by when? You can email these next steps and meeting notes to team members to support accountability.

Here is a note taking template created in Word so you can type directly into it if your prefer taking notes on your computer:

Click Here to Download

If you prefer taking notes by hand, here is a PDF printable you can print in color or black and white and pop into your notebook:

Click Here to Download

Here is a Word doc template you can use to create your agenda:

Click Here to Download 

Lastly, a little candy and/or coffee never hurts the spirit of any meeting! Wink, wink.

I hope you find these tips and tools helpful. Thanks to blog reader Anna for sharing her thoughts on putting together a meeting note-taking sheet. If you ever have thoughts on coaching resources/tools that would be helpful for you, please don’t hesitate to let me know! I’ll try to work it into a future post.

Thanks for reading,