Plan Reading Instruction Efficiently With These 13 Goals

Anyone who thinks teachers have it easy should try organizing differentiated lessons to meet the individual needs of 25 or more readers!

Reading teachers have two big goals for every reader: to be skillful, and to discover a lifetime love of reading. In the short term, it helps to focus on specific goals and offer students strategies to meet them. Finding a just-right goal for each reader can help manage differentiation and ensure you’re teaching the right strategy at the right time to the right student. Nationally known teacher and staff developer Jennifer Serravallo uses these 13 goals as guideposts for her teaching.

1. Preemergent and emergent reading

Before readers begin reading conventional print, they can do many things readers do by using the pictures: tell stories across the pages, look closely at pictures in nonfiction texts to learn about topics and details, and work with partners to enjoy their books.

2. Reading engagement

Engagement is everything. Richard Allington’s research shows that the biggest difference maker in learning to read is time spent actually reading. Students need to learn how to stay focused on their reading, develop stamina to read for long stretches and across pages, and choose books that they’ll love. Engagement is more than compliance or staying on task. It’s about helping children love to read.

3. Print work

Readers use meaning and syntactic and visual clues to read the words on the page. That means they need practice matching words to pictures, or what they know about the story to ensure what they read makes sense. They need practice using grammar, sentence structure, and parts of speech to problem-solve words or sentences. And they need practice applying phonics skills to break apart challenging words and make sure that the word they read matches the letters on the page.

4. Fluency

Reading should sound like talk. When we teach readers to read in proper phrases and with expression, emphasis, and pacing, we teach them to reflect the meaning in the text. Plus reading with fluency helps them to better understand!

5. Fiction: Plot and setting

Comprehension is like making a movie in the mind. Plot and setting are crucial elements, so it’s important to teach and assess for understanding problems/conflicts, retelling/summarizing, visualizing the world of the book, and synthesizing cause and effect.

6. Fiction: Characters

What’s more important to enjoying fiction than identifying with characters? To engage with a story, readers need to know what characters look like, what they sound like, what they feel, what they do, and how they change.

7. Fiction: Themes and ideas

Helping children to think deeply about underlying ideas in the text is about pointing them to the why of a story. This category includes thinking about lessons or messages, symbolism, and social issues.

8. Nonfiction: Main topics and ideas

Determining importance is especially crucial in nonfiction. Readers need to understand what the text is mostly about so that its pieces come together as a whole — especially when they include an array of opinions or conflicting statements.

9. Nonfiction: Key details

Not every detail is important in a nonfiction text. Pointing students toward the key details means clueing them in to the facts and information that best supports the main idea. As texts become more complex and information packed, this skill becomes increasingly important.

10. Nonfiction: Text features

Identifying text features is a staple of nonfiction teaching, but research by Nell K. Duke suggests that readers need more support on using text features once they spot them — especially in terms of synthesizing them with the text.

11. Fiction and nonfiction: Vocabulary and figurative language

The importance of vocabulary and figurative language was long ago confirmed by reading researchers. But research also shows that most vocabulary is learned in the course of reading. The support of this goal, therefore, requires increasing readers’ word-consciousness and strategies to figure out new words in the midst of reading.

12. Conversation: Speaking, listening, and deepening comprehension

Reading is both solitary and social. We might read by ourselves, but don’t we love to talk about favorite books?! Teaching students to talk about books and listen to others’ opinions can boost comprehension.

13. Writing about reading

Writing guru Donald Murray said that “Writing is thinking.” So, writing is important to deepening students’ ability to interact with and comprehend texts. Writing may be formal or simply sticky notes that readers place in a text.