Teaching Reading in Small Groups: Differentiated Instruction for Building Strategic, Independent Readers

For teachers who sometimes feel as if data-based instruction, differentiated groupings, and formative assessments somehow involve going over to The Dark Side, this book is a powerful antidote. It will help you know that you can hold tight to your deepest beliefs about children and literature, classrooms communities, and good teaching. Lucy Calkins
Author of Units of Study for Teaching Reading

In Teaching Reading in Small Groups, Jennifer Serravallo extends the powerful teaching that made Conferring with Readers a hit and helps you meet instructional challenges effectively and efficiently.

Jen shows how small groups help you uncover hidden time in your teaching for meeting individual students' needs. You'll work more closely with more children each day with her how-tos on:

• using formative assessment to create groups of readers with common needs
• differentiating for individuals, even when they're in a group
• enhancing your Tier 1 and Tier 2 instruction.

You'll see how Jen captures the strength of individual conference while working with multiple students-even if they aren't reading the same book. For comprehension, fluency, engagement, print work strategies, and comprehension, she shares ideas for assessment and flexible grouping structures as well as her own teaching language. You'll help readers:

• get into texts and get more out of them
• learn vital strategies that help them read more challenging texts
• talk about books with rigor and vigor.

"When we supplement individual conferences with small-group conferences," writes Jennifer Serravallo, "we work more efficiently and can deal well with higher benchmarks, larger class sizes, and the increasing demands placed on readers and teachers." Trust a master teacher and read Teaching Reading in Small Groups to find out how small groups can make a big difference in your classroom.

Jennifer Serravallo is a New York Times bestselling author, award-winning educator, literacy consultant, frequent speaker at state and national conferences, and former member of the Parents Magazine editorial board. In 2023, she launched her podcast To the Classroom: Conversations with Researchers and Educators. Jen is best known for creating books and resources rooted in research that help make responsive, strategic, differentiated literacy instruction possible for all teachers.
Her newest books are THE READING STRATEGIES BOOK 2.0 (2023), TEACHING WRITING IN SMALL GROUPS (March 2021), A TEACHER'S GUIDE TO READING CONFERENCES (2019), and UNDERSTANDING TEXTS AND READERS (2018). Her books and resources are used around the world: THE WRITING STRATEGIES BOOK (2017) and THE READING STRATEGIES BOOK (1st edition) (2015) have have been translated into French, Chinese, and Spanish.
Her comprehension assessment and teaching resources, COMPLETE COMPREHENSION: FICTION and COMPLETE COMPREHENSION: NONFICTION, help teachers make sense of comprehension, especially in whole chapter books and book-length nonfiction texts. They were released in Spring 2019 and are available through Heinemann (Learn more: hein.pub/cc).
Jen holds a BA from Vassar College and an MA from Teachers College, where she has also taught graduate and undergraduate classes.
Follow Jen on Twitter (@jserravallo) and Instagram (@jenniferserravallo), learn more from her website/blog: and join the Literacy Strategies Facebook Community.