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Small Groups, Big Results with Julia Lindsey

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Episode 247

Small-group instruction can feel powerful and overwhelming at the same time. Questions about grouping, time, routines, and impact come up constantly.

In this episode, we’re joined by Julia Lindsey, author of Small Groups, Big Results, to talk about what actually makes small-group instruction work. Julia helps break down small groups into manageable, intentional practices that don’t require more time or complexity, just clearer purpose.

In this conversation, we discuss:

  • Why small groups don’t need to be long to have a big impact
  • How flexible, needs-based grouping supports student growth
  • The role of immediate, specific feedback in small-group reading
  • Practical routines teachers can use right away
  • How small-group instruction connects to Tier 1 teaching

Whether you’re new to small groups or looking to refine your approach, Julia offers clarity, research, and realistic guidance.

RESOURCES

 
We answer your questions about teaching reading in The Literacy 50-A Q&A Handbook for Teachers: Real-World Answers to Questions About Reading That Keep You Up at Night.

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Why Small Groups Feel Overwhelming

Lori

Small groups are one of the most powerful parts of the literacy block, but they can also be one of the most misunderstood. Teachers are expected to do a lot, and it's not always clear what matters most in that time.

Melissa

Today we're joined by Julia Lindsay, author of Small Groups, Big Results, to talk about how to make small group instruction simple, effective, and rooted in the science of reading.

Lori

Hi, teacher friends. I'm Lori. And I'm Melissa. We are two educators who want the best for all kids, and we know you do too.

Melissa

We worked together in Baltimore when the district adopted a new literacy curriculum.

Lori

We realized there was so much more to learn about how to teach reading and writing. Lori and I can't wait to keep learning with you today. Hi, Julia. Welcome back to the podcast. We can't wait to talk about small groups big results. What a great title.

Julia Lindsay

Oh, thank you. And hi, I'm so excited to be back and to get to chat all things literacy with you.

Lori

Yeah. All right, so let's jump right in. Um, you write in your book that small group instruction can sometimes feel overwhelming, which as a teacher I totally agree with. Um, especially as a primary teacher, it is very overwhelming. And honestly, small group even feels a little controversial. Um, but I'm just wondering why you think that is.

Defining Small Group Instruction Clearly

From Levels To Needs-Based Teaching

Julia Lindsey

Yeah, this is, I think, true of probably almost all teachers that it feels somewhat overwhelming. It was certainly my experience, and I talk about this a little in the book, but I just like hated small group instruction because I felt like no matter how much I worked to plan for it, it never was super clear if it was like, oh yeah, that worked. And in retrospect, I understand that that is because I was often, if not exclusively, really using a very rigid understanding of kids reading through their uh through just like their text level. And so I wasn't really like targeting anything in particular in a lot of these lessons. And so as a result, it was very hard to tell if anything was working. And I could plan, I could spend my whole weekend planning and it might not work. And yet it was so much time and energy in the planning and in my classroom to get these small groups to work. So I think that that's a big reason why they feel overwhelming. But recently, I think that they've also become a little bit controversial in certain spaces. And so that I think is, you know, the internet is the space where I've I've seen that, where people talk about, well, maybe all types of small group instruction are sort of a waste of time. And then, of course, you have other people who are like, small group instruction is like the secret sauce of life. And there's a lot of kind of controversy about what's going on here. And my perspective on this is that one of the central reasons that we have this controversy is because there's actually no definition of small group instruction that everyone agrees on. All it is is a definition of group size, right? That's like that, that's all we agree on. Small group means less kids than a whole class. Normally we mean five or fewer kids in kind of a general education setting. And in the best case scenario, we mean three or fewer in an intervention sort of setting. But beyond that, there's actually no definition about the content of these moments, uh, the flow of what's going on here, the why of why we're meeting with kids, how are these connected to whole class experiences? That's not something that as a, you know, society, I suppose, uh, that we've actually like come together and defined. And so, because of that, you could have two people who are arguing about small group instruction who are actually arguing about completely different modes of instruction. And so they could both be right that certain things are a waste of time and that certain things are really highly impactful when done well. So I think that the first thing that we all need to do is to just take a step back and to say, okay, small group instruction is just a way that we can label group size. And in that, we can think of it more as a tool that we can leverage when we need to to support children's needs. And from that vantage point, I think it becomes really clarifying when we start saying things like, instead of what am I gonna fill up this time of day called small group, we think, what are all the needs that exist in my classroom and what's the best way to meet those needs? One tool I can choose to deploy is to meet with those kids in a smaller group than the whole class. And that's gonna give me some huge benefits. It's gonna mean it's much easier to differentiate instruction. It's much easier to hold those kids accountable for getting the kind of practice they need. It's much easier to give them feedback. And so from that lens, I think we start to have a really different conversation about the value of small group, what we can get done in it, and yes, the things that we can let go of too.

Melissa

Yeah, that's so helpful. And I you brought up some things like I heard you talk about leveled texts or you know, your groups were done by text levels. And I know that guided reading is also what people used to think about with like that's what you did in your small groups was guided reading. And so I'm sure there's a little controversy there too, right? Of we've moved away some from some of those practices. So then what? Right? Then what do I do with this time? And like you said, like how do I just fill this time? And what I heard you say is like meeting the needs of your students. Like that is, I feel like that's the shift in the mindset of versus like, okay, levels to the needs of your students. Can you just talk a little bit more about that? Like specifically when you talk about the needs of your students in literacy, what are we talking about?

Using Data To Target Skills

Julia Lindsay

Yes, I think that many educators have heard the message that viewing readers from the lens of just their level and then using level text frameworks to assess children and to give instruction is not research-based. There is not research that proves that this works. In fact, there's research that really calls into question this whole idea of kind of this like stair step and reading development via these levels. And when we teach children in this way, we probably are not using our time the wisest way because we're trying to kind of holistically focus on things that don't make sense together and we might not be truly meeting a particular need. So instead, what I suggest, and what I think many people like to think about, especially in the small group space, is that we really think and we deeply understand through data what are children's needs and how can I then meet them in a small group. So let's take kind of the biggest example. When we think about children's reading development, we often can think about it in terms of word recognition and language comprehension developing simultaneously over time. And so if we just look at word recognition for a second, we can really think about how it builds across time in these larger categories. We have some alphabet and phonemic awareness growth, and then we build our skills into coding, and then we advance those into multisyllabic and multimorphemic words, and then we really build fluency. And if we understand where children are across that spectrum, that's our first step to saying, okay, what would a kid need who's developing alphabet skills is really different than a kid who's developing fluency. And so we can start to make better sense of the types of things kids might need if we first begin by understanding kind of what developmental category children are in. And we often do this with like screeners. Those are a great place to start in in most classrooms where we have a valid, reliable screener. It can help us identify where kids are at. And beyond that, then we start really honing in on the details. So let's stick with that alphabet example for a second. When we notice, okay, I'm teaching kindergarten and I have this group of kids and they're in red on the alphabet on my screener. And we think, oh my goodness, I need to meet these needs more than how I'm being able to meet the needs in my whole class. That's a great place for small group instruction to support you. But the question is, well, what are you teaching then? If your students are in red in the alphabet, are you gonna just teach every letter again? No, because that's very inefficient. And if we are inefficient in small group, we're really risky with our time because we're not only risking the time that we're spending on those kids, but all the other kiddos in the classroom who are, of course, getting to the edge of chaos. So we wanna be super efficient. So instead, we want to ask a follow-up question of our data, which sometimes requires doing another assessment, which is which letters do these children not know? And then we can design targeted small group experiences that aren't just meeting that overall need of alphabet knowledge, but are actually really digging in on they need the letter G. I'm gonna teach a lesson specific to the letter G, and we're really gonna move their skill there, and I'm gonna continually progress monitor to increase the rigor of these experiences around G, and then to move them on. And so when we're thinking about how we're meeting children's needs in small group, we really want to think about assessments that are giving us more precise information than the type of information we might get from something like a leveled reading assessment. But also that we need both those levels of screeners and really detailed information about the exact skills that kids have so that we can hone in on the types of lessons that are really gonna move kids' abilities.

Lori

I I feel like there are some misconceptions about small group. I appreciate the explanation that you gave, but I feel like there's some misconceptions about small group that maybe you wrote this book so that this book clears some things up. And uh, I'm wondering if you would like to share maybe one misconception about small group that that teachers might have and you know, one thing to clear it up.

Busting Misconceptions And Finding Flexibility

Julia Lindsay

So I think that the big misconception that kind of encapsulates everything I was just talking about is small group instruction does not need to be whatever it's always been for you. If you've had like a mode of always doing small group in a certain way, it doesn't have to be like that. That's so freeing. I love that. It's like freedom. Yeah, exactly. And I think that it's really exciting to think about how we can bring in more creativity and more flexibility into this uh tool, again, that can be really high leverage. We have some very high-quality research showing the positive impact of utilizing small group instruction well. And so knowing that you don't have to just do things the way you've always done them, I think can be really exciting. It might feel a little bit overwhelming, but I also hope that it's an invitation to allow you to experiment about what works best for you in your classroom. Um, and some of that might be kind of a little nutty. So I'll share a very quick story about a district where they were working on, again, the alphabet. I promise I'll give examples outside of the alphabet, but they had this cohort of kids who were just not solidifying their alphabet knowledge. And so we talked about, well, what's something creative that we could do here? And when we started talking about these students and the needs that they had in the alphabet, we uncovered something else, which was that a lot of these students also had challenges in executive function and in focusing on lessons. And the solution was that they were just getting more and more time in small group instruction and they were just burning out. And so what did we do instead? Well, we created the sort of set of structures where these kids could get seven three-minute small groups across a day, all targeting actually the same letter. And they were getting many, many, many opportunities to increase their practice in that letter in these tiny snippets of time that were super focused and that were digestible for these kids and manageable for teachers, because it's not nearly as hard to get the rest of the class to engage in something for seven minutes as it is to get the rest of the class to engage in something for a half hour. And so when we're thinking about making small groups work, I really do invite people to think creatively about how we might have some differences in our logistics and structures that support us in leveraging this tool in a way that we're actually delivering evidence-based instruction.

Lori

Oh, I love that. That's so creative and fun. I mean, and very freeing. I think your chapter three in your book, um, Big Ten Questions about small group instruction. If I were trying to think creatively about small groups and I like just got your book on my doorstep, what I would do is look at this chapter and really dig into these big 10 questions to get the framework down for like small group. What do I, how do I want to think about it? What do I want to do? And then I think I can insert some creative ideas in to maybe intersperse it throughout the day or to think about how I'm working with students, like a different group of students, or mixing them up in different ways. I think once you have that foundational understanding, it's it's easy to insert some creativity there. That's a great story though.

Short, Focused Routines That Work

Julia Lindsay

Yeah, yeah. And I think that um if you're coming up to this book and you're not sure how to approach it, if you're really wanting to kind of dive in and make big changes, definitely getting some time to let yourself really marinate on those first three chapters. I talk about the purpose of small group instruction, the kind of data and understandings we need about reading, and then these big questions. But I also know people who are like, no, I'm raring to go. I want to try one of the routines in the book. I want to just get in and do something. And I have heard so many incredible stories from educators who grab the book and read a chapter or even just part of one of the chapters on routines on like a Thursday night and then on a Friday morning go in and try out one of these new routines. So if that's more your style, you can also enter the book in that way. But I would definitely suggest at some point going back and giving yourself some space to think about those three kind of more intro chapters along with the five routine-based chapters.

Melissa

Yeah, so you've mentioned the routines a couple of times now. So I know, I know we have listeners that are just like that, like, yeah, I want to hear about those. Um, and I loved hearing you say things like these are short, manageable, efficient. As a teacher, I'm like, yes, I want, I want to know what she's gonna tell me what to do here. So you have 21 research-backed routines in your book. So we're not gonna talk about all 21 of them, but can you tell us a little bit about what these routines are like and maybe give us some examples?

Practice, Repetition, And Quality Feedback

Julia Lindsay

Yeah, so let's go backwards a little bit and talk about like the why of these routines. Why did I select them? So the first thing to know, and I kind of gave you a little bit of uh uh intro into this earlier, the first thing to know is that the routines are broken up across kind of five categories of reading, if you will. So there's four categories across word recognition. We start with alphabet knowledge and phonemic awareness, developing decoding skills, advancing those decoding skills into multislabic and multimorphemic words, fluency, and then more deepening of the reading comprehension work as well, which is of course highly connected to reading uh language comprehension. And so, first things first, it's unlikely that you're gonna need all 21 routines, right? Because probably if you are in kindergarten and you're working on those alphabet skills, you hopefully will not be in a place where you also have kids who are truly developing fluency. So try not to feel like immediately overwhelmed when we say 21 routines. Um, and then I think that the next question is well, how did I come up with these routines and like why these routines? And I'll give you a little secret, which is not so secret because I do say it right in the intro of the book, but there's nothing that's special about these routines in the sense that they're like secret, special small group routines. All of these routines, if you wanted to, you could actually use them in the whole class environment. So, what makes them small group routines? Well, it's because of the way that we're using them. And when we're using them to really target students' needs in a smaller group, then they become a small group routine. But they're based on the same incredible evidence that we would be looking at if we're trying to better understand decoding or better understand language comprehension or reading comprehension. So some of these things hopefully feel very, very familiar to you, either because you've already used them in small groups, or maybe some of them you've actually already done in some whole class environments. So across all of the routines, though, they have some really core things in common. And the big kind of idea is the why. Why do we use smaller groups? What is the purpose of pulling a smaller group of kids? And the number one thing that we want to think about is how when we have a smaller group in front of us, it's much easier to ensure that we're getting kids practice in exactly what they need to move their skills forward with our support and feedback. So we're able to really tailor those practice opportunities. We're able to increase the density of practice we're getting in a singular moment because less kids is less to manage. And we're able to hold them accountable because we can actually hear them saying those sounds or reading those words or reading phrases. And then we're able to give them feedback to move them along. So all of the routines across these areas and these 21 routines are all based on this idea of how do I get kids more practice and exactly what they would need to move forward. And so you're gonna feel the same structure across all of the routines. We have some review, we have some explicit instruction, we have that practice, which is more kind of isolated work, and then we have application, where we get the chance to apply our knowledge into a more contextualized experience. And then the last thing kind of I'll say about in general across the routines is there's a lot of things that you could target in reading. Um, these routines are based on what research suggests is really important to push on and can be malleable and moved with explicit instruction. And they're also based on those common challenges that we see kids encounter over and over again at our grade levels. It's based on those things that we see like in kindergarten. Why can't these kids blend three sounds? I've done everything I can in my core work. They're still not blending three sounds. What am I supposed to do next? There's a solution for that. Or these kids just cannot figure out how to break up three plus syllable words. We've done all this syllable work, we've done all this work with morphemes. They're just not breaking up words. What am I supposed to do? There's a solution, solution for that. Or these children are great readers, except they cannot, for the life of them, infer the meaning of a new word. They come up to a new word in text and they make up something bizarre. They read unbearable and they tell me, well, that sentence was talking about how those, you know, people in this school don't know anything about bears. And you're like, no, what are you talking about? And you've done vocabulary work in whole class and you have really rich language instruction, but they're just not getting it. There's a solution for that. What are you going to do next that's in support of and bolstering your whole class instruction that kind of solves the challenges that we tend to see across reading? So that's a big overview of kind of like the why of the routines and what you'll see across all of these different spaces, all the way from the alphabet, all the way up through comprehension, because I know that everybody is hungry for stuff across that whole spectrum.

Lori

Yeah, and I love how efficient these routines are, Julia. You said, you know, you can use them in small groups, but they're also good practice for whole groups too. So I'm just thinking if I'm listening. I'd be like, all right, I feel really free to try this in multiple settings so I can hone the craft of each routine and maybe, you know, try it in a whole group and then try it in a small group with that targeted, like you said, okay, I'm noticing this, so I need to do this. I'm gonna try this routine, we're gonna continue practicing maybe, you know, in a different way. Maybe uh if there's more repetitions, more practice. Can you say a little bit about practice here before we talk about, you know, how teachers can use these routines? I think practice is a really important part. Um, and what I've heard you say in the past is like lots of repetitions are important. But I know from weightlifting that like you can't just do more reps and and see results. You have to do really good quality reps. So I'm interested in in what you have to say about practice here.

Varied Reps Across Contexts

How Often To Run Groups And For Whom

Julia Lindsay

Yeah, if there was any secret sauce to getting kids to be better readers, it's practice. And it's in thinking about, as you were just noting, how we're creating really the right types of practice. And so that means that we are going to have things that look very different over children's reading development. We can't just give them the same type of practice. We can't just say, read a book and we go through the steps of a lesson with a book across all of these areas of development. So there's going to be some really big differences in how practice feels across time. But I think that one of the things that we get a little bit twisted when we're talking about reading is that we don't, well, maybe just when we're talking about academic skills, is that we want to get to the good stuff sometimes and we don't think about the just the reps and the practice that kids need to get. If a child told you that they wanted to be in the NBA one day, you would not even think twice about it if they said that every afternoon they are, you know, in their backyard and they're dribbling and they're shooting hoops and they're doing all of this work and they are doing their basics. They're doing their basics, they're doing their calisthetics, all this sort of thing. You would not even blink if they told you that. But for some reason, it's harder sometimes for us to talk about. Well, if children want to be readers, which to be frank, in order to succeed in a society that is built around being literate, you need to be a reader. You don't necessarily need to be a voracious lover of fiction, but you need to be a reader. And so if we know that kids need to do that, then we shouldn't blink twice about thinking about the number of reps that they're gonna need. And so the first big idea about practice is that it's often much more practice than we think it is. I think one of the most interesting findings around this is that there is a study that looked at um what made a difference in phonics and phonics intervention. So this is whole class and small group work, and it was really the density of practice. Teachers who gave students 1.8 or more practice opportunities per minute saw better results. That's a lot of reps in a lot, like so many more than we might think. If you start thinking about your whole class lessons that are probably about a half hour, we're talking, you know, 54 or more practice opportunities. And then if we also think about this through the lens of meaning as well, we know that children, particularly children who are learning English, need a lot of opportunities to encounter words in context to make sense of that meaning. 12 to 18 repetitions in different contexts is generally kind of one of the research findings that we have. So, not just one or two times, but 12, 18, we're talking about a lot of chances to get hot this practice, but specifically in what it is that they're working on. And then the next layer of practice is the feedback. When we are acquiring a new skill as a human, any skill, feedback is one of the most important things to acquiring that skill. We know that when we have high quality feedback, that we're better able to master that skill because we're practicing correctly and we're getting the support that we need. And in fact, there was an interesting study done on decoders and done on the type of feedback that kids were getting. And we see that the type of feedback that gives kids the opportunity to become a better decoder is going to lead to a much bigger impact than no feedback at all, or then feedback that's kind of like related to some other aspect of the reading. So when we're thinking about practice, we first want to think to ourselves, it's probably more than I think. If the kids aren't getting something in your classroom, instead of your first thought being like, oh my gosh, they don't understand this, or I'm a bad teacher, or I just need to strictly reteach it, first think, have they really had enough opportunities to practice this skill? And then the second thing to think about is, well, how exactly am I doing that? If you are having kids practice the alphabet and you're having them look at letters and say the sounds or hear the sounds and select a letter, that's a great kind of practice. But if you're teaching morphology and you're having kids look at a prefix and just say e re, probably not a great type of practice because we need to be doing something that's connecting the meaning and the sound and the uh spelling all at once. And then the third level to think about is your feedback. How are you getting really precise in your prompting so that you are ensuring that kids are honing in on that exact skill you're trying to get them to use and that the next time they come up to the same kind of challenge, they're going to have a better idea of what to do next.

Melissa

Julia, can I just ask? So specifically with those uh phonic skills I'm thinking of right now, when you say the repetitions in the practice, I'm assuming that's not just you you kind of said it already, but like doing the same thing over and over and over again. I'm imagining like they could be writing those words, they could be decoding those words, you know, they could be just seeing it in different contexts, maybe one word, maybe within a text. So can you just talk a little bit about that, about how it, you know, and and it might not even just be like all at one time, right? Like you might do a little bit here and a little bit there and a little bit there. Um, because I just don't want it to feel like, okay, they're not getting that G. So we're just gonna go through G and G and G and G and G. Um, but I'm imagining that would get a little boring for kids too. So what does that really look like?

Julia Lindsay

Yeah, we don't yeah, we don't mean that if they are working to if they're trying to read dog, you just like sit there and have them like dog dog over again.

Lori

Well, they got 30 reps. There you go.

Melissa

Very efficient, but the kids would be like, no, I'm not doing this small group anymore.

Julia Lindsay

Yeah, yeah. So again, you're hitting on exactly the right things. We're thinking about building their skill in decoding requires things like building their skill and phonemic awareness and building their practice in uh decoding and also encoding. And that can happen in a whole lot of different contexts. It could happen just uh even in a word list sometimes, or it could happen in things like a word building, one of my absolute favorite things to build kids' skills, or it could happen within a decodable text, or it could happen in a decodable that's a little bit more content-oriented and has a little bit more challenge going on. Um, there's a whole lot of things that we can do. And in the book, one of the things I really tried to do was include lots of different examples of the types of activities that are used in research studies to support these specific skills. And the reason I did that is because when I was a teacher, I often felt like I had to like come up with things on the fly. And I was never like quite sure if the activity I had come up with was doing what I needed it to do. And so I wanted people to have like these repositories of ideas and to say, like, yes, the activities in the book are from studies and research that have been done on these specific skills and are part of interventions and other protocols that do move kids' skills. So we can use those either as they are or as a starting point for more creative solutions for kids to get the practice that they need in that one moment, but also, yes, over time. And if you remember when I kind of first introduced the routines, I had said the first step in the routines is review. And so always making sure we're getting some time to review previously learned skills. And then when we're in that practice space, we're also getting time to review previously learned skills because we want to intermingle skills that we already know with the new ones. And some people would suggest somewhere around a 50-50 split: 50% things that they have already worked on, and 50% that new stuff. So that we are getting uh the repetition that we need without it being repetitive and without it being all just like one blob of G.

Can You Teach Multiple Skills At Once

Lori

So, Julia, if teachers are listening and they're thinking, okay, so do I use these routines daily, weekly, based on need? I mean, off the cuff, I'm hearing you say you could use these whenever they're needed. Um, they're your repository, use them, but I want you to answer that, not me. Um, and I'd love for you to just add a little bit there, like, you know, if it is based on need, how do I make these decisions? And they're big decisions to make.

Timing, Efficiency, And Class Management

Julia Lindsay

Yeah. So the first thing that you do, again, is that you start with your data because you are gonna want to use these routines based on need. And I would invite you to start with your data in a way where you look at your whole class and you say, What's the needs across my classroom? What are the things that really actually need to be occurring whole class? And so it might look like this. Maybe you're teaching second grade and you get all of your classes data. Um, and so this might look like you have a screening tool. Maybe it's like you have Dibbles or NWEA or something where you're getting kind of a landscape view of certain aspects of kids' skills and you get an idea of okay, who in my classroom is at risk in certain categories and who is performing around grade level. That can really help you when you start honing in on more specifics to know who are you probably gonna have to give extra support to. And then you might also have a second layer of data. I really hope that you do. And if you are in those K2 zones, or if you have a classroom that's older, but they have a lot of needs in decoding, which it's gonna be uh a star for you to know that you might need to investigate this, is if your students have lower than average oral reading fluency. And so then we might say, okay, now I need a sort of second step of information. And so that might look like something like UFLY has a great assessment where you can look at kids' decoding skills across their scope and sequence, core phonics, quick phonics, um, the informal decoding inventory. All of these are examples of assessments that we can give to understand more about well, where are kids' decoding needs falling. And if you are working with kids who have slightly higher skills, uh make sure that the assessment you grab goes deeply into multisyllabic words, not just those single syllable words. But you can broadly use your phonic scope and sequence to kind of understand where you might need to be assessing. So we're looking at our kids across these categories. We know kind of okay, who's probably gonna need more help? We know, okay, now here's the decoding across my class and what I need to focus on whole group. So if you see everyone in my class does not know digraphs, be more efficient. Do it in a do it in your whole class and say, like, we're going to get this done in the whole class. With a lot of practice. Yes, with a lot of practice. And then we are going to make sure that our small groups are really targeting some more specific needs. So again, we're just gonna stick with this example of second grade, and we're gonna pretend like it's the beginning of the year because it's a little cleaner. Um, but let's say that you have like 25 kids and you identify maybe a couple things that are actually first grade skills, but you know you need to rehit those in second grade. And you then are going to say, okay, now what are the other skills that I'm supporting in small group? You are probably gonna have groups of kids that you're saying, whoa, they are way off from where the rest of my class is. Probably if my school has it, they're also gonna need intervention. But those kids also are gonna deserve small group from you that's targeting their skills and that's rapidly getting them up to grade level. So we find out where those kids are on a on this scale of phonics and we start providing small group there. If you can do it every day, that's awesome. If you can do it a couple of times a week, that also works. You're probably thinking in the 10 to 15 minute range. And then we have probably a group of kids that's kind of on grade level with us. And the best thing to do for those kids is to monitor how they're doing every week in phonics. Uh, things like weekly checks or weekly assessments. You can use spelling things, but not a spelling test that you send home, but an encoding assessment of their skills from that week. And then we say, okay, this group of kids got more like 70% right. They need more practice with that skill in a small group. Or this group of kids got 90% right. They now need the chance to get more application, more advanced decodables in this. Or, and then our final category might be the kids who are like far stars. They're way up and above your second grade level. Again, this whole example of second grade. They are not really decoding anymore. They are really into multisyllabic words, or maybe even beyond that. And for those kids, you might meet with them fairly infrequently. Um, ideally, you're meeting with them once a week still, so that you have this touch point because we do know that small group instruction does have a meaningful impact on kids' motivation, engagement, and relationship with you. But you might not meet with them for very long and you might focus on a totally different area. You might do something like repeated readings or readers' theaters, or you might be working on specific skills to get kids greater access to multisyllabic words, where you're really building up different categories of work, and maybe that's only one time a week. So when you're thinking about your whole class, really thinking about kind of triaging the needs across your class and pouring most into those who need the most. And you'll notice that the need that I triaged is decoding. And there is a reason for that. At this point in time, we do have slightly stronger research on small groups for decoding and fluency than for language comprehension. The caveat being that this is a lot more complicated when we're supporting English language learners. And we definitely want to make sure that we are supporting those children fully in their language development. But in general, we have slightly stronger reason to believe that these targeted small groups are going to be really beneficial in decoding. And so we want to triage those decoding needs first and then layer on needs around reading and language comprehension as we move on. And again, really checking in with other experts in your school around how we are fully supporting English learners, both in small group and in whole class, to get greater and greater access to the language.

Lori

All right, Julia. So that's really helpful. I'm thinking about that group that you just talked about, that second grade group that maybe is above and beyond, right? They might be working on reader's theater, they might be working on multisyllabic words. I just want to start there because I think the question that I'm about to ask would be well poised for that group of students, and then maybe we can work backwards. Um, but I'm wondering if you can give an example of if we are pulling that group of students. Can we work on more than one thing in small group with that group of students? Now, I heard you say earlier, teachers are being so creative. We're pulling students for three minutes, we're pulling students, you know, we can with the time, we can be creative with the time. So I'm I'm thinking maybe we don't do the three-minute example here because that might be tricky in this in this question. Um, but if we're thinking about pulling these kiddos for a typical, let's just say like eight to ten minutes, um could we to teach more than one skill in that time? Um and what did that what does that look like? I'm hoping we can start with that group that's a little bit more advanced for a second grade and then perhaps walk it back to what that might look like with other groups. And again, we don't have to go super deep, but just like a brief hit on examples for each one.

Aligning Small Groups To Core Instruction

Julia Lindsay

So we want to really think about how we're using our time here. And so in these targeted small groups, we're really focused on getting kids kind of the exact amount of practice that they need to master a specific skill. But the obvious thing uh is that reading is not just one thing at a time. So there's going to be intermingling of certain things, as especially as children's skills get bigger and um more advanced. And so, first things first, I do think it's important to aim to keep our focus and clarity on that one main thing. And the reason for this is that we have some uh we have research around targeted interventions that show that this is a more effective approach than a multi-component approach in many cases. And so we want to have the ability to hone in on that one thing. When we hone in on one thing, we also have a greater ability to leverage really high-quality research about how do you actually move that particular skill. But again, reading is ultimately going to require that children are utilizing multiple skills at once. So if we think about those children who are, for example, engaged in fluency, first of all, we want to use our targeted fluency small groups for children who have mastered or have at least pretty high proficiency in decoding. Research finds that we don't receive any benefit from targeting fluency too early. And so we don't really want to use too much of our time on that. But once children are in these groups, for example, we might be working on something like readers' theater, which is maybe something that you've done in the past, but you might be thinking, well, I kind of am not sure that that's research based. It seems a little hippy-dippy or something like that. Well, it's actually very based in research. I know that uh if you haven't listened before, I know that there's podcast episodes right here on Melissa and Laurie that talk about how amazing Reader's Theater is and the incredible benefits we see in research and in reality.

Lori

Yeah, I'm linking it in the show notes right now, Julia, while you're talking.

Julia Lindsay

I love it. Yes. And it's probably Chase Young, um, who is I have a lot of his research is part of uh what I use to create certain parts of the fluency chapter in the book. So when we're thinking about this group of kids, maybe we're working on improving their prosody in fluency work. Well, what is prosody? It's the ability to read with the kind of right expression and inflection and pacing. In order to do that, you have to be engaging in comprehension. You aren't just applying your word recognition skills. So we are inherently going to have multiple components of reading coming to play as children's skills get more advanced in these lessons. But even though our experience is going to include some things like asking some text-dependent questions and ensuring that children are making sense of the text, we want to keep our instructional clarity on that one specific target. Okay, we're improving fluency. And this week in particular, we're working on, say, improving our phrasing and text. And the reason for that, again, is that I think it really helps us be efficient and it helps us and children have greater clarity and greater focus on what it is that we're really working on.

Melissa

All right. I have to ask you some like really practical questions here because I know one of the things with small groups is the management of it. And so I have two questions in my head. One is like, I know I hear you saying like these can take three minutes, five minutes. And I always think as a teacher, like, you tell me it's gonna take five minutes, and it ends up taking like 20. So I'm wondering if you have tips on keeping those short and efficient, and also the age old question, you know it already. What's the rest of the class doing? So um I kind of have both of those in my head at the same time because it's all wrapped up in like how do I keep this running smoothly and efficiently to make the most of this time.

One Big Idea: See Something, Teach Something

Closing Notes And Resources

Julia Lindsay

Those aren't just some questions, those are the questions I think that we ask about small group instruction. So we definitely do have to get into them. First things first, let's think about the timing of groups. Generally, I think a lot of groups can take between like seven and 15 minutes and be really well done. But that is a group that you have already done. That's after you've already maybe done that routine before, maybe a few times. And that's after you have established really strong procedures and routines in your classroom for management. That's not saying that the very first time you do something, that it might take that amount of time. I would say be gentle with yourself as you try some of these things out and figure out what's working for you. The second way that we can be efficient, though, is not just in kind of getting better in our own practice, but in changing our perspective a little bit, that small group instruction, when it is done in this way that's so targeted to practice, might not always feel like a lesson. It might feel more like an activity that you're bringing kids together for. So you might notice sometimes that the explicit instruction in a certain area, if you think about it, if you say it out loud to yourself before a lesson, you might realize, oh, that's only gonna take me like 20 seconds to say. It's not a ton about uh the length of time that kind of you're talking. A lot of these routines can be done in a pretty efficient manner because they're really oftentimes more like focused on the activity. So that's another way that we can kind of be really efficient in the use of our time. And then to the last big question of what are the other kids doing, I would say we need to reframe that a little bit. And instead of thinking about what are the rest of the kids doing, think about what do these kids do after this group? And if we think about, well, what do these kids need next? And we think about that across all of the kids in our classroom, then we're able to provide them slightly more useful practice opportunities extended beyond the time that they're with us. And that might sound overwhelming at first, but across most classrooms, there's going to be a big category of things that most kids are going to get the benefit from. So I'm not actually suggesting that you come up with like 26 different post group activities. So, what do I mean by that? Well, I mean if you just had a group and they were pulled with you and they were working on, let's stick with our reader's theater example, what is the next best thing that they could be doing that they might be able to accomplish with more independence? Well, the best thing that they could be doing is actually continuing to work on a repeated reading of, say, a longer text that has a deeper connection to content and vocabulary with a partner. And they could engage in fluency uh protocols that are designed for partners, like the sport protocols that multiple researchers talk about, including Jake Downs, who I also know has been on the podcast. This is like my fluency podcaster shout-out day. Um, and they can engage in those kinds of protocols and they can learn how to do those with the partner so that they are continuing to get those hits of fluency practice. Or you might have children who are working on decoding skills. What are the best things that they can do after your group? They can continue to repeatedly read a decodable text that they've already read with you. Again, I like it when it's with a partner. They could read slightly easier decodable text with a partner or by themselves. They can engage in decoding games. Uh, probably everybody has used some games like this, like the roll and read game, uh, where that's there's a lot of these on the UFLY website, or I love the resources from FCRR.org that has just like incredible repository of all kinds of games targeted to the types of things that kids could do on their own. Here's the secret: just like you hate it when you go over to like your brother-in-law's house and he pulls out Settlers of Catan and is like, let's play this game and doesn't explain the rules, you have to take the time to explain to kids how they're going to play these games and partnerships and dedicate some time to teaching kids to be good partners for this to work. And it's okay if that takes more time than you thought it would. And it's okay if that means that again, we introduce a little flexibility into our timing. If you are really dedicated to having a half-hour small group block, it might look like you take 12 minutes where you teach a single group. And then instead of pulling your next group immediately, you take some time, like six minutes maybe in the middle, where you are actually circulating and supporting in children working in their partnerships in productive ways. Or you might actually pull the whole class back together, do a wiggle break, do something, getting kids' minds in a different space, and then let them release again. And then you pull a second group, and maybe the second group is another 12 minutes, maybe it's only 10 minutes. And that's okay. I think that we get so rigid in some of these structures around centers and stations where we feel like we have to change everything every 10 minutes for everybody, that we get kind of caught up more in the logistics than in the what of what we're doing. And it turns out there's no research showing us what's the perfect logistics of small groups. There's no research on centers or stations. So you don't need to feel beholden to those. So you can change up how you're pulling students. Maybe you're pulling everybody from the same activity and sending them back out to a new one. Maybe you're pulling groups that are different lengths of time. Maybe you're pulling groups at different times of day. There's all of these opportunities that we can explore when we start to allow ourselves to be a little bit more flexible.

Lori

Yeah, and Julia, one thing I'm thinking about as you're sharing that is, you know, there are some real constraints. I just want to say that like sometimes there are schedules that have, you know, this time to this time a small group. And that, you know, if a leader does walk in your room, oh what, what, you know, why are we not doing small group? Well, okay, well, Julia's book is based in research and it says that it's okay to do 10 minutes here, five minutes here, and then continue on because I'm meeting the needs of my students. So if you're a teacher listening, feel free to send this podcast episode to a leader, to someone who needs to hear this, like fully support it, because I don't think that like I don't think any adult who works with children would say that a schedule should override the needs of your students. And I I think what I'm hearing you say is that like we're really trying to think outside of the box here so that small groups can support the needs of our students and then the schedule should support that, right?

Julia Lindsay

Yeah, and I actually have uh one of the QA's in the book is like, what about if I have all these constraints and I have a little chart that says like try this, if this is a constraint. I see that and I like it a lot, yeah. Yeah, yeah. But I I want to just pause on what you just said around this should be really about supporting the needs. And I think that the one other point that I really want to make sure to make about small group instruction is that the hope is that what it's doing is bolstering the impacts of your whole class core work. And we do see in research that when small group instruction is tightly aligned to our whole class work, what we see is a bolstering of the impact. And I think that that's another area where we kind of got small groups wrong in the past, where it ended up being it's like its own chamber, its own like content area. It has its own scope and sequence, its own goals, its own routines, all of these things. And in at least in my classroom, I can tell you for certain that small group instruction did not speak to whole class instruction at all. There were no connections that I was making, um, unless it was sort of incidentally, to phonics, to read aloud, to science or social studies, or to writing. They it was just a completely separate thing. And instead, if we think about small group instruction as bolstering our whole class work by connecting with it intentionally, we can see a much bigger impact. So that means again, back to our phonics examples, thinking about using the same scope and sequence in phonics. And a child might be at a very different spot than your whole class instruction, but they're moving on the same scope. Or a child might be right at your scope and sequence and you're just providing more support and feedback. Or a child might be kind of can really moving pretty fast. And what you're doing is you're giving them more ability to apply in more and more complex experiences. Or if you're thinking about children who are reading text, and those might be decodables, but they might be more complex. We're thinking about is there a way to select texts that are deeply connected to the knowledge that I'm building for children in my English language arts block or whatever you call it, in science, in social studies? And if there's not, is there a way to develop text sets within our small group instruction so that we do have this connection to knowledge? Because I think that that's an area that we can really explore and can make small group go from this weird thing that sits in the corner to this really powerful tool that we're using to hone in on and solve challenges for students while simultaneously bolstering their access and impacts of our whole class core content.

Lori

That's so helpful. I like that. So, Julie, if if you could leave teachers with one thing, one big idea from small groups, big results, what would it be? I feel like there's so many.

Julia Lindsay

There are so many ideas that I would love to leave people with, but let me try to pick one. Okay, I think it's this. Um, and I say this in the book a couple times, but and it might kind of come out of left field because I haven't said a lot about it today. So bear with me. And it's this if you see something, teach something. And I think that we often have an approach in small group instruction where we might feel like we have to wait until there's like some formal moment that shows us this kid needs this. And while we really need clear data, and I really encourage you to be collecting consistent data all the time, we can also just teach something. If you see over and over again that a child cannot blend words in your whole class phonics, please don't wait until December to get a formal assessment result back from your district screener that says this child is red in blending. Just teach it. Just go ahead and teach it. You can quickly and formally assess to make sure that your observation matches reality, but then let's do something about it. And when we are able to be proactive like this, we can actually prevent reading challenges before they ever occur. We can solve a lot of things in our classroom without needing to get outside support, which I know in so many places that support is really minimal anyhow. So I know we have to solve a lot of challenges in our classroom. And so when I, when you notice something, whether that's in the data or in observations, when you see something, teach something and ensure that we can get kids what they need so that they can keep on moving and keep on becoming those incredible, empowered young readers that we know that they can become.

Melissa

Such a great motto. If you see something, teach something. I feel like that should just be for life.

Julia Lindsay

Yeah, well, I don't know. I hope that it's not trademarked by there's certain entities that use that. Um it, but I think it's got a better, it's got a better uh ring to it when we say teach something. Um, so yeah.

Melissa

Well, thank you so much, Julia. We we always love talking to you. And I mean, if I was a teacher who is doing small group in any way or wanted to, and I mean, this book would be where I would want to go immediately because you give such great, you know, ideas to think about how to change it, but then really practical ways to actually do it. So we'll link it in our show notes if anyone is looking for a link to small groups big results, and it's definitely worth checking out. So thank you for your time today to talk about it.

Julia Lindsay

Thank you so much for having me. And I do hope that it helps. I think that anyone in a system might want to pick this up and take a look. If you're a leader and you're trying to think about what should small groups look like for us, if you're a classroom teacher and you want to change up your own practices or just find something that might take things from good to great, or if you're in a more of an intervention space, I think that the book has a lot of helpful routines that you can integrate into a strong intervention program because they're all based on so much research. Every routine is basically based in an entire literature review of research. So I hope that anyone who picks this up can figure out how to make sure that their small groups are giving them big results too.

Melissa

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Lori

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Melissa

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Lori

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