Guided Reading: Strategies for the Differentiated Classroom

Lead your students through new creative ways of approaching increasingly challenging texts. This course will help you discover how to build a balanced literary framework that gets results with even the most challenged learners.

6 Weeks / 24 Course Hrs

Currently Enrolling

Offered in partnership with your preferred school

ed2go

Change School

Learning method

Self-paced

$149

No instructor. Study on your own schedule

Enroll Now

Instructor-led

$149

Confirm your start date in cart

Starting May 18 | June 15

Details + Objectives

Course code: 4gr

Mixed in the right proportion, differentiated instruction will help you build a balanced literary framework that gets results with even the most challenged learners.

In this course, you will learn differentiated instruction tactics that will help you understand how your students learn. When you apply those tactics within the guided reading framework, which helps you lead students through new ways of approaching text, great things start to happen. The result is a classroom full of students who can negotiate increasingly challenging texts with unprecedented fluency.

This course is critical for modern educators, who often must teach on the run with limited resources and unlimited demands on their time. Get ready to reach your readers with ease in no time flat!

What you will learn

Learn how to combine differentiated instruction with guided reading
Learn how to evaluate your students' readiness and interests to drive meaningful, productive and focused instruction
Learn to assess your students through pre, ongoing, and summative assessments
Use assessments to adjust teaching strategies
Discover how to accommodate a diversity of students through flexible grouping
Become familiar with an after-reading framework that will teach students to turn information into ideas
Learn to anchor your students to the material they have learned through games, writing prompts and many other creative activities

How you will benefit

Learn how to direct student reading to get the greatest results
Create independent readers who are confident and capable of negotiating new texts with ease
Build positive reading experiences for your students

How the course is taught

Instructor-led or self-paced online course
6 Weeks or 3 Months access
24 course hours

Outline

If you have you ever wished you had a good way to reach your struggling readers, you're ready to transform reading instruction with differentiated instruction and guided reading. In this lesson, you will discover how blending these techniques will help you build a balanced literary framework.

The first step in helping your students is getting to know who they are and how their minds work. In this lesson, you will learn how to evaluate your students' readiness, interests, learning profiles, and social elements.

Assessment is at the heart of differentiated instruction. In this lesson, learn how to plan quality pre-, ongoing, and summative assessments that will give you a clear picture of student learning. The best part of assessing students at multiple intervals is that you can tell what is working and what isn't.

In this lesson, you will discuss flexible groups. These are a mainstay in the differentiated classroom because they allow you to combine students for different reasons on different days. Sometimes you will combine students based on interests and other times based on readiness or learning profile.

There are thousands of options when it comes to selecting the texts you will teach. This lesson will teach you how narrow down your options by understanding the criteria of good fiction and nonfiction texts.

Did you know that a lot of the learning process hinges on what you do to prepare students before they start reading? It's easy to just introduce a text and let students have at it, but if you plan the time before reading with activities that build anticipation, you will be amazed by the results.

How students read a text is a highly personal matter, but in the classroom, you must direct their reading to get the greatest results. In this lesson, you will learn how to teach students the right way to read, to comprehend what they've just read, and to make inferences.

This lesson covers the after-reading framework, where you will teach students to turn information into ideas as they go beyond the text and into the world.

If you think of your classroom as a ladder, you will realize that you have a lot of students on a lot of different rungs. In this lesson you will explore tiering, which helps you separate students based on their readiness, interests, or learning profiles.

What do you do with those extra 10 or 15 minutes at the end of a lesson or a school day? An increasingly popular strategy is to anchor your students to the material they've learned by extending learning in new avenues.

The ultimate goal of the balanced literary framework is to create independent readers. In this lesson, you will learn the basics of curriculum compacting, learning contracts, and individual projects, all of which will help your students transition to independence.

This lesson wraps up the course by reviewing the foundation that you build for classroom learning. Your attitude is everything. Beyond that, you need to be able to encourage struggling readers and help parents extend the learning at home.

Instructors & Support

A veteran educator who has taught every grade but third, Marsha Spears has spent 35 years teaching students and training teachers. Spears earned a bachelor's and master's degree in educational administration with a specialty in curriculum and literacy development, training that would prepare her to take on the toughest of classrooms. And tough classrooms are where she made her mark, helping a wide variety of at-risk learners read with renewed confidence. Over the years, thousands of students and teachers have learned how easily they can incorporate Spears' reading techniques and activities into their daily routines.

Requirements

Prerequisites:

There are no prerequisites to take this course.

Requirements:

Hardware Requirements:

This course can be taken on either a PC or Mac.

Software Requirements:

PC: Windows 8 or later.
Mac: macOS 10.6 or later.
Browser: The latest version of Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox are preferred. Microsoft Edge and Safari are also compatible.
Adobe Acrobat Reader.
Software must be installed and fully operational before the course begins.

Other:

Email capabilities and access to a personal email account.

Instructional Material Requirements:

The instructional materials required for this course are included in enrollment and will be available online.

FAQ

Instructor-Led: A new session of each course begins each month. Please refer to the session start dates for scheduling.
Self-Paced: You can start this course at any time your schedule permits.

Instructor-Led: Once a course session starts, two lessons will be released each week for the 6 week duration of your course. You will have access to all previously released lessons until the course ends.
Self-Paced: You have 3 month access to the course. After enrolling, you can learn and complete the course at your own pace, within the allotted access period.

Instructor-Led: The interactive discussion area for each lesson automatically closes two weeks after each lesson is released, so you're encouraged to complete each lesson within two weeks of its release.
Self-Paced: There is no time limit to complete each lesson, other than completing all lessons within the allotted access period.

Instructor-Led: The final exam will be released on the same day as the last lesson. Once the final exam has been released, you will have two weeks plus 10 days (24 days total) to complete the final and finish any remaining lessons in your course. No further extensions can be provided beyond these 10 days.
Self-Paced: Because this course is self-paced, no extensions will be granted after the start of your enrollment.

Reviews

Wow, I loved this chapter!! Thank you, Marsha. I would love to meet you and share experiences. My goal at school this year has been to try to get my teachers to buy into differentiation of instruction. "NO TIME! NO TIME!" This is the common theme. Thank you for giving such quick practical suggestions that can be implemented in five minutes or fifty minutes, teacher's choice! For those of you who are not currently teaching, this course has been one of the most logical and practical that I have had. Start now making things for your future classrooms. I believe I remember one of my classmates used these ideas with their own children.

For me, the most beneficial part of the class was the assignments. I could go right back to my class the next day and I had something to do with the class that I knew was meaningful and beneficial to my students and me. The kids loved helping me with my "homework" and I think it served as an excellent example of being a lifelong learner…I feel much better about myself as a reading teacher and I know taking this class will help me better meet the needs of my students…I will definitely recommend ed2go and this instructor to others.

I really enjoyed this class. It confirmed a lot of Guided Reading Strategies that I already use, but taught me so much about Differentiated Instruction that I did not know. It was excellent and I will recommend this course to others. This instructor's class was tough but awesome! It really took effort, which it should.

This class was very helpful to me. I like the instructor's presentation and style. After reading the lesson I was encouraged and eager to try out new techniques with my students. I highly recommed this class to other teachers and would absolutely take another class with this instructor. Thank you!

This class provided me with many strategies and techniques I could use not only in my classroom, but for my children as well. It reiterated the importance of Bloom's Taxonomy and Gardner's multiple intelligence theory as well as many others. I enjoyed reading through and printing materials from the supplemental websites that the teacher recommended. It gave me great ideas to not only use in the classroom but also at home with my children. Thank you!

I really enjoyed this class. The instructor is a master teacher. Her writing and information were well planned and easy to follow. The examples given were easy to understand and relate to. It was an excellent experience.

Fabulous course! I have been teaching for 20 plus years and I still learned so much. Thank you!

The course answered the questions I had about improving my instruction of literature. Being an older teacher, I want to keep with the current teachings, and this class did just that.

I thought the instructor did a great job. Lots of good ideas!!