No doubt you are in the midst of starting out another school year, and it is nonstop craziness. #teacherlife, am I right? 

It’s critical that you manage your time well at the beginning of the school year and that you prioritize the things that are most important to student success.  Jumping in with reading groups is one of those things. 

Reading groups are a high impact routine to set up in your classroom.  It provides a way for you to give quality small group instruction to your students that is differentiated to meet all their unique needs.  It also boosts student comprehension and engagement.  Bonus: setting them up doesn’t have to be time consuming or stressful.  

I’m here to give you 4 quick and easy steps to set up your reading groups:

1. Assess your students’ current levels in various reading skills

2. Organize your Data

3. Analyze Your Data

4. Group Your Students

STEP 1: Assess your students’ current levels 

Before you can group your students, you need to know where they are at.  You can do this with a wide variety of assessments.  Your school may require you to give specific beginning of year assessments, which you can use for this purpose, or you can find your own. 

The basic things you are looking to assess are the following: Oral Reading Fluency and Reading Comprehension. (If you teach primary grades you will want to do a more detailed assessment of phonemic awareness.) These are the two main components of reading, so if you have a good baseline of where your students are starting in each of those areas, you can group them more effectively. 

STEP 2: Organize your Data

After you have given the assessment(s), you need to organize your data so you can read it easily and analyze it in order to group your students effectively.  You can organize it in whatever way makes the most sense to you.  Some options include: 

• Making an excel spreadsheet

• Graphing the results 

• Putting the results into a table or chart

Upon entering your data, you may choose to color code it based on certain benchmarks or percentiles. (And if you’re like me, then everything is better when it’s color coded.) You can ask your administration if they have specific benchmarks they would like you to use to categorize your students. 

A lot of times there will at least be ORF norms and percentiles that you can refer to.  There are many online, but they are all slightly different, so I would suggest checking with your admin first to see if they have a specific one your school uses.  You will use this data to start identifying 3 categories of students: Advanced, On-level, and Below Level.

STEP 3: Analyze your Data

Now that your data is organized (and maybe color coded *wink wink*), you can begin to make sense of it and see groupings form. If you only have one assessment to go off of, such as an ORF assessment, you will be grouping students solely based on their level and skill in that area.

If you have at least two data points to go off of, it will give you a fuller picture of that student’s skills and needs.  The easiest way to see trends in your data quickly is to color code (like I said, everything is better that way).  If you prefer not to, you may want to graph your data to be able to visualize where your students are at.  (This is super easy to do if you plugged the data into excel).

STEP 4: Group your Students

Now, you need to decide how you will group your students.  Typically, if you are doing guided reading lessons in your reading groups, you will want to group by approximate reading level.  That way, the text you will be reading with your group will be at an instructional level for all of the students.  Which means it won’t be too hard or too easy for them. 

This is always a good place to start with reading groups because you don’t yet have enough specific data to group them according to other needs like, reading comprehension strategies, or phonics intervention.  However, if you did give a more detailed initial assessment, you can create reading strategy groups for students who have similar needs as well. You also want to keep your groups to about 3-5 students if possible. The smaller the better. 

The great thing about reading groups is that they are tailored to your students’ needs.  So you are most likely going to change your groups at some point during the year.  Students learn at different paces, so someone may need to be moved out of a group where the level has become too easy for them.  Or you may mix up your groups according to reading skills they haven’t mastered yet.  It’s important to see that the initial way you group your students isn’t set in stone.  You have the ability to change them around whenever you need to. 

This should alleviate a lot of the stress within this process because there’s no pressure to get your groups exactly right the first time.  The important thing is to just get STARTED.  Then you can respond and adjust as you go and learn more of the particulars of your students’ needs. You got this!

1. What processes do you use to create reading groups?

2. Do you use reading groups in your classroom?  Why or why not?