30 Big-Idea Lessons for Small Groups

The Teaching Framework for ANY Text and EVERY Reader

Michael Rafferty, Colleen Morello, Paraskevi Rountos

• Publisher: Corwin
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781506334387
• eBook ISBN: 9781506348636
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Intermediate grade readers are not an M, an N, or an O—they're idea-wranglers, ready to comprehend when we honor who they are as thinkers first

In 30 Big Idea Lessons for Small Groups, educators Rafferty, Morello, and Rountos provide an amazing framework that gets students interacting with texts. You prompt and guide, but they think! Big-Idea groups are the piece that's been missing from small group instruction: engagement from the get-go.
Follow this unique 4-part process to develop students' literal, inferential, evaluative, and analytical skills: 

1. Engage: Before Reading Using a tactile tool like a topic card or a pyramid, readers literally move ideas around on their small group table as they debate a question related to the text  and to big ideas about courage, persistence, love, and honesty, and more. 
2. Discuss: During Reading Students read and mark up a short text, exploring questions that get at the author's take on the big idea, noticing key vocabulary, text structure, moments of inference, and more. 
3. Deep-See Think: After Reading Students re-read, synthesize, and revise their interpretations together and tweak the tactile tool, based on questions that probe the big idea in new and deeper ways. 
4. Connect: After Reading Students summarize, and begin to transfer their understandings to other texts in independent reading and the world beyond, primed for this all-important transfer because they've been engaged in topics that clearly relate to their lives.  

Tap into 30 lessons organized by text complexity, reproducible forms, assessments, and a bank of engagement tools so you can switch it up. Use these lessons across the year as a warm up to a whole-class novel, to augment your core reading program, to challenge your capable readers and bring your striving readers in to rich yet accessible reading experiences. 

Chapter 1 Big-Idea Groups Scaffolded Reading Instruction Where Engagement Rules

Do we really need another approach to small-group reading instruction? After all, we can choose from literature circles, book clubs, guided reading, and strategy groups—to name a few. As I began to write this book, what kept me saying, “Yes, teachers do need this twist we’ve been using in Connecticut schools,” is that the lesson framework we share gets us back to the core reason we read anything: to better understand life and the big questions within it. And it gets us back to the core reason we teach: because each lesson helps students approach reading a text with a little more engagement, confidence, and collaboration than occurs with many other small-group protocols.

Colleen, Paraskevi, and I teach in Connecticut, in the luminous shadow of the famous aviation engineer Igor Sikorsky, who designed the first helicopter and lived in nearby Stratford. He once said, “Whatever contribution I have been able to make to aeronautics has been a product of diverse intellects working together in freedom and harmony” (Calhoun & Knapp, 2004, p. 37). I’ve always admired that quote, because freedom and harmony are all too rare in our discussions about teaching reading—perhaps especially the concept of freedom.

When I give professional development workshops, I ask teachers, “As you think about your own classroom, how much freedom of thought do your students have in the day?”

Do their students have opportunities to

• ◗ Take risks in response to texts?
• ◗ Engage in inventive thinking about what an author might be getting at, shaded by their own experiences?
• ◗ Expect that a book is meant to engage their emotions?

Most teachers shake their heads, no. We are all feeling such pressure to have students comprehend at high levels, but we may be actually creating conditions for students to disengage from reading because we’ve overfocused the lens.

A final set of questions to ponder: If we spend the majority of small-group discussion time nose down, attending to what the text says, are we neglecting something important about the reading process? Are we neglecting the reader?

Author Lois Lowry wasn’t asked this question per se, but in her 1994 Newbery Medal acceptance speech for The Giver (1993), she sure does remind us that when it comes to a book’s meaning, the reader matters: “Those of you who hoped that I would stand here tonight and reveal the ‘true’ ending, the ‘right’ interpretation of the ending, will be disappointed. There isn’t one. There’s a right one for each of us, and it depends on our own beliefs, our own hopes.”

In big-idea lessons, students figure out what the text says and means, and do all the interpretive, evaluative, and critical response work of best practice, but what sets this approach apart is that it builds in more room for students to bring their own personal beliefs and hopes into the response process. It embraces the transactional theory of reading, and as explained in this chapter, we have designed interactions with texts that tap both the efferent and aesthetic responses defined by Rosenblatt (1995; Rosenblatt & Progressive Education Association, 1938). Students are given the chance to bring their own aesthetic, personal, and emotional response into discussion from the outset of the lesson design, yet are guided to tether it to universal understandings of concepts like fairness, justice, and love. And when they read a text, they learn to adjust their response to the information and ideas on the page.

We devised the big-idea framework based on the questions teachers often raise about deepening comprehension during book discussion:

• ◗ How can I see more interaction during small-group reading sessions?
• ◗ How can I make responding to texts hands-on, literally, for students who need it to be as concrete as possible?
• ◗ How can I get students to discuss a text with one another and not through me?
• ◗ How can I encourage deep thinking?
• ◗ How can I assess my students for thinking across levels of comprehension and levels of thinking?
• ◗ How can I get students to see the small-group work as a session that links to other parts of the day and night (their independent reading, their homework, their dinner-table talk)?

The Ultimate Goal: Real Student Independence

Behind all these questions is a teacher’s desire for students to own more of the learning, something more and more educators are concerned about. There seems to be a groundswell of voices around this issue of student independence. In her book Mindsets and Moves: Strategies That Help Readers Take Charge (2016), Gravity Goldberg goes so far as to call it an ownership crisis and puts forth a wise first step when she says, “We have to step back so our readers can step forward” (p. 2). And she’s right. We all want to witness that “aha” moment, when we see our students are using what we’ve taught them on their own, but it’s easier said than done.

How do we turn small-group reading sessions into high-spirited discussions among students working together? How do we get students to reach out—sitting on the edge of their seats, fired up with thought and opinions, and fueled by curiosity?

Now Look at Student Independence During Big-Idea Groups

“Reading and writing float on a sea of talk,” educator James Britton famously said in 1970 (p. 164), and we hope that as you look at the following photos, of what my colleagues and I are doing with small-group reading and discussion, you will sense the energy of students’ talk. See what you notice (or, rather, what you don’t see!).

Inviting readers to think first.

Students have time to ponder and change opinions.

The students go off to work on their own and hold themselves responsible to the task and ideas.

Four Facets of the Framework

1. The texts are deep—and brief. The first ingredient is a set of carefully selected, brief but theme-rich, stand-alone texts or excerpts from longer works that provide students with sufficient challenge. When I travel to their classrooms, teachers often ask if I can provide them with exciting and discussion-worthy texts. This is where the journey to this new brand of small-group reading groups started for me: In order to be a real resource as a curriculum leader in language arts, I was faced with supplying teachers with engaging texts that would provide sufficient stretch for students. What I found is that discussion-worthy texts are those that are rich in their ideas and invitations to inference. So, as you will see in this book, the texts are often spare, but the thinking around them is always robust. The first one you’ll come across in this book? “Humpty Dumpty.”

2. Students converse—but with the teacher in the wings. What didn’t you see in those photos? The teacher! The teacher is coming on and off stage from the wings, modeling his or her thinking when needed, but the key is that students are asked to think, talk, and ruminate on their own—even before they read the text. So the second ingredient is to have students lead their own thinking and reading sessions. Stepping back allows students to take over the task because you trust the ideas you’ve put in front of the students. Yes, it is a big measuring cup of collaborative learning, during which students are reading, writing, speaking, and listening, bringing their own selves to bear on the topic, first. The research shows that students learn more deeply when they are engaged in complex tasks that involve collaboration, and peer collaboration is a high-impact practice, meaning that, when implemented well, it brings about a year or more of growth in students (Fisher, Frey, & Hattie, 2016).

3. The conversation starter is high—but low. The teachers I work with always give me an amused, puzzled expression when I mention this ingredient. What I mean is that the spark—the initial prompt—has a high degree of reliability for students and a high level of thinking attached to it, but it’s low-hanging fruit in that it is accessible and taps into students’ lived experience and knowledge. For me, the spark happens when we make the discussion more interesting from the get-go, when we dare to lead with a well-considered, debatable idea or topic that can be talked about in advance of the text. In a way, this prereading discussion question helps students do their own frontloading, building peer-to-peer understandings that will be mirrored and refracted by the text the teacher has selected.

4. Students move toward conceptual knowledge—but with physical tools. The fourth ingredient: concrete, touchable tools so students of any reading level can literally have something to hang onto as they work to grasp abstract textual ideas. My colleagues and I have been bowled over by how much these materials help advanced and striving readers demonstrate how their thinking changes as they read and talk. There should be ideas on the table worth discussing—ideas you can literally reach out and touch. Word sorts, graphic organizers, and concept maps all have strong research support (Fisher et al., 2016).

How Big-Idea Groups Fit Within Other Small-Group Models

Big-idea groups are another tool in your toolbox, along with guided reading, close reading, literature circles, book clubs, strategy groups, and the whole-class novel—all choices that we make at different junctures for different reasons, and for different students. Each of these formats offers a different pathway toward the same goal: to have students understand the reading process and use it independently. As a teacher, it’s your knowledge of your readers that will guide you in deciding which students need which format when.

A Few Important Frameworks for Reading Closely

We think of big-idea groups as scaffolded, small-group reading instruction, meaning the teacher has carefully choreographed the reading experience. We also would say these groups fall under the umbrella of close reading, if we define close reading as an approach that has been around since Gutenberg invented the printing press and people began poring over pages. That is,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Acknowledgements
• Half Title
• Acknowledgements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• The Lesson Planners at a Glance
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 Big-Idea Groups Scaffolded Reading Instruction Where Engagement Rules
• Chapter 2 The Lesson Design
• Chapter 3 The Tools of Engagement
• Chapter 4 The 30 Lesson Planners
• Chapter 5 Transferring Thinking Across the Day
• Chapter 6 Assessing Readers Within and Beyond the Group
• Chapter 7 Useful Forms and Lists for Big-Idea Groups
• References
• Index
• About the Authors
• Publisher Note