Instructional Decisions for Small Groups

This afternoon, our class participated in a webinar called: Making Decisions for Individual Learners Within a Small-Group Setting. The presenters were Pat Johnson, Diane DeFord, and Mary Cappellini. A few things jumped out at me that I wanted to share. -Keep in mind that small group literacy instruction is about developing processing systems and providing time for students to practice using them. Teachers should not focus on teaching a list of items or looking for a specific book to teach a certain skill. -If a child is stuck on a word and provides evidence of using visual information to figure it out, prompt the child to use other cues (meaning or syntactic) as opposed to more visual information. -Pictures are meaning cues, not visual. Visual cues refer to the word and how it looks. -Slow processing can be expected for problem solving using newly learned strategies. Students need opportunities to practice these strategies until processing becomes automatic. -"Reading depends more on what is behind the eyes---on the nonvisual information than on the visual information in front of them."~Frank Smith