Last year I posted about dipping my toes into whole class teaching for literacy. What provoked this move was a huge amount of frustration, in fact it is a frustration I still hear often from many teachers, particularly those in the junior - middle school. I was feeling 'spread to thin' for want of a better word, with too many groups, trying so hard to meet a diverse range of needs by doing what I had always done... reading groups. Even though I was well into my Science of Reading journey, I had still clung to my reading groups. It is how I was taught to teach reading, it is how I had always managed it and I didn't know of any other approach.
By the end of 2022 I knew I just couldn't spend another year like this, rushing from group to group, not giving enough time and feeling frazzled by the end of the day. I have shared a lot more here if you want to read it https://numberagents.blogspot.com/2023/04/whole-class-reading-my-experience-so-far.html
So in 2023 I embarked on whole class 'literacy' sessions. Taught in bite sized, manageable amounts across the day. These sessions included phonemic development, revision of sounds, teaching of new sound, formation, reading and spelling.
These whole class sessions were not the be all and end all of my literacy approach and you can read much more about this in previous posts.
In Term 1 and 2 I wrote my own sessions, but then stumbled across UFLI Foundations. I am a massive believer in not reinventing the wheel and these wonderful sessions provided a fantastic foundation for my own sessions and allowed me to tweak or add dependent on the need of my class.
I found myself a little clunky at first, but found my stride and broke up the sessions into bite sized amounts over the day, as I had with my own plans.
I have to admit, by not having reading groups at all and delivering the same session to the whole class, I did wonder if my children would make reasonable progress. I wondered, would it be over the head of those that were still consolidating some of the previous sounds? Would it give those that already had those sounds a challenge and move them on? Was I doing a disservice to my children by not having targeted groups? For background purposes, I teach Year 1/2.
(It is important to put in here, that if you have not read my other posts, I do provided Tier 2 support in my class for literacy and math and last year had about five or six children I was working with on and off throughout the year.)
What did I find?
It is also important to note here that this is my experience, what I found, based on the achievement of my class and does not count as 'research.'
What I found is that children LOVED it. No longer in groups, they were learning exactly the same thing as the child next to them, reading the same words, spelling the same words, writing the same sentences, reading the same text. (I did not use the UFLI text, it is the only thing I didn't like, but wrote my own character based stories, with the children's help.).
They loved the rhythm of the sessions, they knew what to expect, I guess there were no surprises. UFLI is based on solid research theories, such as distributed review, repeated practice, gradual release, interleaved practice. This meant there was a lot of scaffolding and lots of repetition.
When I got to the end of the year and looked at the results, there were many surprises too. Every child had made great progress, those who required tier two had established a huge amount of automatic knowledge and it was embedded, being reflected in spelling assessments and writing assessments. Many exceeded my expectations and actually established a lot of knowledge beyond the 'stage' I would have previously had them reading on. My records of reading, using fluency sentences, sequenced according to stages also showed excellent fluency. What was most pleasing is that children had great strategies to solve unknown words in stages that they had not been working on yet.
A lot of this progress can also probably be put down to our 'decodable' paper texts exposing them to parts of the code that had not yet been taught.
Throughout the year I really noticed a lot of self-teaching, children with good foundations, beginning to make connections between the known and the not yet known.
In previous years I would have 'assessed' children at the stage they had been reading at in our group, maybe a stage above....but what I found is that children ended the year status quo. What I mean is those in the top groups, were still in the top groups, those in the bottom groups were still in the bottom groups, even though they had progress, there wasn't necessarily movement in groups. Of course I reviewed my groups each term, and often midway through a term, but a child moving between groups was the exception rather than the rule.
With whole class teaching there was nothing for them to move between and what I found was that a significant number of children had made progress beyond what I may have expected at the beginning of the year.
Whole class literacy teaching also gave me time, it gave me time to work with my Tier two children, time to engage, time to observe, time to notice and respond.
Don't get me wrong, there is a place for groups and our children that were 'ready' for it were doing some 'extra' reading with my co-teacher on her days, based on the more complex parts of the code we were starting to learn. Kind of like the reverse of Tier 2. We also do a lot of individual goal setting and support, so have a great handle on where they are at.
It certainly was not perfect this year, I tried a lot, I changed a lot, I learned a lot. But I will not be going back to reading groups and if you are thinking about making a change in your approach to start the year, I urge you to give it a try!
BTW - I also teach maths whole class in the same way and provide Tier 2 support for those that need it.
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