S7 E6 - Practical Steps When Grouping for Phonics

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Hello, hello. Welcome to this episode of the Structured Literacy Podcast recorded here in Tasmania, the lands of the Palawa people. I'm Jocelyn and I am very happy to have you here. In our last episode, I shared what happened when I went looking for specific research about grouping or targeted instruction for phonics. I shared what the research actually says, and I want to recap that really briefly before we move into today's content, which is all about the practical elements of the work.

It's all very well to talk about research, and that's lovely, but we need guidance about what it actually can look like in practice, and that's what we're covering today. But I do want to say that there is no one size fits all in terms of making a plan to respond to your students' needs. So I'm going to share suggestions today, but please know that the size of your school will make a big difference to how you decide to respond. If you are a one teacher in a Foundation to 2 classroom, you have no choice but to do group rotation, there's nothing else for it unless you happen to have a couple of extra teachers who can pop in and help you out, but having taught in one teacher schools and two teacher schools... and three teacher schools and four teacher schools, I can tell you that there's never enough grown-ups. So you do what you can with the people you have.

Last Week's Podcast

So to really quickly recap, the research that's been conducted on groupings did find that providing students with instruction at their instructional level, air quotes, showed minimal to no gains. But, and this is important, the instructional methods used in that research was balanced literacy. So we would actually not expect there to be significant gains when the practices were flawed in the first place. What we don't yet have is research specifically examining the impact of delivering systematic synthetic phonics in a robust and explicit way that is also targeted and matched to a student's point of need. What we do have is many years of intervention trials showing that when you provide targeted, matched instruction for students who are struggling, they make gains. And the earlier you start, the more likely it is that those students will catch up with their peers. So, in other words, the longer you leave it, the less likely it is that they will make sufficient progress to reach the same point as their classmates in phonics and decoding, which will impact everything else.

So, with that as our foundation, let's talk about what this can look like in practice. And I want to just say that much of what I'm sharing with you today has been born from my own experience in school. So this is not something that I dreamed up and then I said, hey, this would be a really good idea. I have made this work and I have helped other people make this work, even to the point where schools who were very highly academic said, yep, we're good, we want to be better. And through targeted instruction, they became better, their data became stronger. The number of students who were in the red in DIBELS moving into Year 2 and Year 3 was virtually none. So I'm coming to you with experience in what can actually work, but know that I am not an expert in your school. So as you consider how this can work and you work with your colleagues, know that you need to make it work for you.

What is Whole Class

Before we get right into it again, I know there's three before's we get into it now, I'm really sorry, everybody, but I do want to take a moment to talk about what we actually mean by grouping and what we mean by whole class. Because I know that there are many Principals who are being given the directive from the system, from the Department of Education, from whatever system they're working in, that you have to teach whole class because that is equitable. So I want to have a chat about what do we mean by whole class, by whole group, and what are we talking about when we talk about a group?

We could say that whole class instruction could mean that every student who is on your role is in front of you in the lesson receiving the same lesson. Whole group instruction, on the other hand, could mean that every student in this particular group, whether that's 6 students, 16 students, or 26 students, is together in front of the teacher learning at the same time. Now, this maximizes instructional time for everybody while providing the targeted teaching that's needed. So please don't misunderstand. Please know that when I'm talking about grouping for instruction, I am not talking about breaking everyone up into groups of six. We are talking about the most efficient way to meet the needs of a range of students.

True small groups tend to be reserved for outlier students, those who are significantly ahead of their peers and those who are significantly behind and have particular needs. These students sit far apart at opposite ends of the bell curve. And the small group comes about not because fewer students is better, but because we tend to have smaller numbers of students who have those learning profiles. The other groups who are being worked with will be of a size that is something approaching a regular class size, and that's absolutely fine. So we're not saying that grouping is better because the groups are small. What we're talking about is engineering success for every student.

Instructional Precision

So, with all of that clear, let's actually think about the steps that we need to take to get to a point where we're providing genuinely targeted instruction. And I want to introduce a term that I believe represents the next frontier for us in education. And that term is instructional precision. I feel like I should trademark that because it's a really good term and it captures the next part of our journey to go from not much explicit teaching happening to yes, you know what, this is pretty good, is a lot of work, it's a lot of money, and it feels like a whole lot of effort. And we are providing instruction that's pretty good. It's just that we're not getting precise enough outcomes. We're not having every student learn. And this is where the instructional precision comes in.

Many of us have moved away from inquiry-based and balanced literacy approaches. We've embraced explicit teaching, and I don't mean that in the sergeant major kind of way. I mean the kind of explicit teaching where we ensure students can attend and fully engage, where we provide many opportunities for them to respond, where we check for understanding throughout the lesson, and where we make instructional decisions based on what we observe in our students, not based on the pacing guide of a predetermined lesson plan or sequence. That is explicit teaching. But good intentions and a general move toward this sort of practice just aren't enough on their own to get the job done. So instructional precision is what we're aiming for, because the more precise our instructional decisions are, the better our outcomes will be. Instructional precision is also about leveraging the power of our understanding of cognition, not just to run a great lesson, but to design instruction that optimises intrinsic load and maximises schema building. It's not enough to say, but we do checking for understanding and we do retrieval. This needs to be baked into the very fabric of the unit and the lesson. And unfortunately, much of what we're using in terms of our instructional materials are not doing that. But that's a topic for another episode.

Step Number One: Data

So step number one in creating the conditions for instructional precision is to gather your data. We need to know where our students are up to. Now, tools like DIBELS are great screeners, they do a fantastic job for what they're designed for, but they are not ideal for a detailed picture of where a student's phonics knowledge sits. The letter sound subtest in DIBELS or Acadience doesn't cover enough breadth of phoneme-grapheme correspondences to give you a reliable indication of where a student is in their phonics development and knowledge. So we really need to have a tool that's specifically aimed at phonics knowledge. If you already gather this data, fantastic, you have what you need, but I want you to have a think about something. The ultimate goal of phonics instruction is that students can use their knowledge of the code for both reading and spelling. Testing only the recognition side of phonics, showing students graphemes and asking them to say the sounds is good, but it only gives you half the picture. So the relationship between phonics knowledge and spelling is bi-directional. Students need to be able to retrieve grapheme-phoneme correspondences automatically and apply them in writing, not just recognise them in isolation.

In the second edition of Reading Success in Action, our phonics program that's currently in development, we are moving the assessment so that regular check-ins are done via spelling retrieval rather than just recognition alone and that this is baked into the fabric of the lessons. So spelling is a reliable and efficient indicator of student phonics knowledge. It'll also help you avoid a situation that we see all the time, where we've organised groups or we've made a decision or formed an impression about a student's knowledge. We begin instruction and then discover that the students can recognise the graphemes, but they can't retrieve them to spell a word. And the effects of this are seen all the way through the upper primary and into secondary where students have reasonable or good reading, but the spelling is another story. It makes things really messy very quickly.

If you already have a spelling assessment tool that's attached to the phonics program you use, wonderful, you already have what you need. But if you don't, we have one available in the Free Resources section on the Jocelyn Seamer Education website, and we'll link to it in the show notes for you. Now it was written specifically for Years 3 to 6, but it can be used in a Year 1/2 context, just be mindful of how you manage the administration, you might like to create a simpler student response sheet. As well as phoneme-grapheme correspondence knowledge that is captured through questions like write down all the ways you know how to spell 'a', it's a good idea to include some word-level spelling in your assessment. Not 75 words, but a small collection of pseudo-words, something like "mip" and "pon", simple CVC or CCVC nonsense words. The question we're answering here is, can this student use the code to tackle an unknown word? Because that's our ultimate indicator of growth and understanding. We're not just looking to see how many real words a student has memorised. We're looking for how well they can use their phonics knowledge in an unfamiliar context. And that is what we'll use to determine the groupings.

One more important note on data management. Before you start sorting your assessment sheets into groupings, take a photocopy. The classroom teacher should keep the original record of their own students. This is important for them to stay across the progress of every child on their role. So the photocopy is what gets sorted into the grouping piles. And when you assign groups to the adults who'll be teaching them, you provide the adult with the photocopied sheets for the students they're teaching. Because to know where the gaps are is exactly how a teacher decides where to begin instruction. They're not all just going to start at lesson one.

Step Number Two: Analyse

Step number two is to analyse your data as a team. Once your data is collected, it's time to look at it together. Gather all of the teachers with their assessment sheets and physically make piles. Lay things out on a table so you can actually see the spread of need across the school year level. Count up how many students are sitting in each particular phase of your scope and sequence. And what you're looking for is this: are the students largely clustered together with just a couple of outliers at either end? Or is there a wide spread with students distributed significantly across the scope and sequence? These two scenarios call for quite different responses. If most of the students are within a similar range, say within five or six graphemes of each other, you will likely keep classes intact with their own teacher and then arrange something separate for the outliers. Unless, of course, you don't have more grown-ups to manage the something separate for the outliers. In that case, you will probably use the same approach as if the spread is wide, which is to look at organising the students across the classrooms and including every adult that you have.

So the goal here is not to create a homogenous group where every student in front of you is the same. Because even within any grouping, you're going to have a range. The goal is to narrow the range in front of any one adult at a time. Because when we do that, everything gets easier. The lesson flows better. You can move at a pace that suits the group. And the gaps you're targeting are actually the gaps of the students in front of you, rather than trying to fill 20 different gaps in a whole class lesson simultaneously.

Step Number Three: Forming Groups

So step three, form your groups. Once you see what the data is telling you, you're ready to form the groups. And I have a few principles to guide you here. First, your most experienced and skilled teacher takes the group with the highest needs, the students who are furthest back in the scope and sequence. This is not a task to allocate to the least experienced adult in the room, certainly not to allocate to a classroom assistant. These students need the expertise of an experienced, informed teacher.

Secondly, your extension group. These are the students who may already have most of the code and are ready for something more, or they're much further ahead in the scope and sequence, and you know that they learn very quickly. These students also need an experienced teacher. Stretching capable students and moving them into a more sophisticated application of reading and writing requires expertise and the ability to adjust on the spot because there's a fine balance to be achieved between stretching and pushing too hard and trying to get the students to do things that are well beyond where they are. Classroom assistants, though, can absolutely be a part of this grouping picture and they can take a group. I have seen this successfully work with my own eyes in my own schools and in schools who I support. But we have to make sure that our colleagues are trained, that they are mentored, that they take a group of on-track students, not the highest needs ones. And critically, they need support, a leader who can check in, coach, and step in when needed.

In terms of group size, please don't be wedded to small. Remember, that's not what we're talking about. Most students will learn very effectively in a group of 20 to 25 when instruction is tight, focused, and well paced. Now, students with disabilities or significant other needs may well benefit from a smaller group, but the instruction itself is always the more important variable. And remember, the leader makes the final call on the groupings. This is not necessarily a decision that's done by consensus. Now, teachers absolutely need to have input, they know their students, their social and emotional needs, and which students might need a slightly different placement despite what the data says. The knowledge that teachers have about their students matters enormously. But ultimately, somebody needs to drive that bus, and that is the leader's job.

It is a reality that you are probably going to have more groups of students than you have adults. That is very common. And so you'll need to make some decisions about when to combine the groups. When you have to do this, do it at the top end. So students who are tracking well can manage a slightly broader range of content. If the students don't have any learning difficulties, then a little bit of range is not going to kill them. But students at the earlier stages of reading development need instruction to be as precisely matched as possible. So that's where we want to preserve the grouping as purely as we can.

Step Number Four: Prepare to Launch

Step number four is prepare to launch. Before the first day of grouped instruction, there's a few things to sort out. The leader's job is to make sure that none of the logistics fall on individual teachers to solve alone. So reach agreement on how you will all manage resources, pencils, books, and other materials so that every adult taking a group knows exactly what to expect, and no one is making seven decisions all at once on the morning of the first day of grouping.

Organise a simple one-page document, a table in a Word document is plenty, with each teacher's name, the broad focus of the group, and the students in it. Everyone gets a copy. Sophisticated colour-coded spreadsheets are not the goal here. Clarity is. For the first day of grouped instruction, here's my top tip. All of the students gather in a central space, like a courtyard or a large classroom, the library, wherever works. And they sit with their classroom teacher, like an assembly. Each adult taking a group calls out the students' names who will be in their group. Those students stand up and then they follow that adult to the space where they're going to be learning. That first session is not about content, it's about learning routines, how to enter the space, where things are, and how the lessons run. Invest that time in getting the routines right and it will pay dividends. On day two, have a leader standing in the middle of the flow of foot traffic to redirect any students who aren't sure where they're going. But by day three, they will know, and it really does quickly come together.

When you first launch grouped instruction, I'd recommend treating the initial phase as a sprint. In those first couple of weeks, the leader is actively present, doing walkthroughs, team teaching alongside classroom assistants, identifying anything that needs a quick fix. After about four weeks, bring the whole team together, assistants included, for a more formal evaluation. Talk openly about what's working. Name up the things that are still a little clunky because there will always be some little point of logistics to tighten. Work through the problem solving together. Every problem that you encounter is figureoutable. When you approach it as a team, you are a group of intelligent professionals, you will be able to work it out. And remember, the best solution for your school might not be the one from the school down the road. So keep the elements of instruction strong and make it work for you.

Common Questions

Now, some common questions that come up when schools embark on this work are, How do you know when it's time to change groupings? Well, once you're up and running, roughly changing every term is about right. Regrouping requires assessment. So we need to build that into the cycle and agree on how that's going to be done. In the early stages, you might reassess and adjust a little sooner while you're finding your feet, but it doesn't take long before once a term is right. And remember that these groupings are flexible groupings based on what the data says, not on predetermined ideas of who's clever and who's not.

Now, How does the classroom teacher stay across their own students' progress? This is a really valid concern and a common problem. So, firstly, having the data sheet for your own class group, your own role group, means that you can make informed decisions about what reinforcement happens in the home classroom, whether that's through homework, partner practice during some reading time after lunch, or a brief check-in at a small group table. There's also the practical decisions to make about whether partner reading happens in the phonics group or in the home classroom. Now, each of these has genuine advantages, and we're going to put together a little ebook for schools so that you can have a little more nuanced information. But the short version is talk about it as a team, trial something and then evaluate.

A common question is, Won't the students feel bad about being in a lower group? And here's the question we always ask in return: have a look at those students who are struggling in the whole class lesson right now. Look at their body language, look at their eyes, look at the level of heavy lifting they're actually doing versus how much they're being compliant. How are they feeling right now? Because when a student arrives in a group where the content is exactly right for them, where they are set up for success from the very first moment of the lesson, the response is almost always one of relief. They feel capable, they feel seen, and they feel successful because they are successful. The key here is that we're not communicating a hierarchy to the students. You don't name the groups, the wombats and the eagles and the turkeys. You don't tell anyone who is in which group. So the student goes to Mrs. Smith's class for reading, and that's all they need to know. And if a student asks whether they're in the top group, the simple answer is: you are in exactly the right group for you. Full stop. And hold firm on that as a group of teachers, especially when talking with parents, because where there's going to be doubt, it's going to be for the parents who believe that their children should be in the top group and they're not. And so have a plan, give everyone a little script so it's the consistent messaging to the parent group.

A Recap For Today

So let's do a quick recap of what we've covered today. We started by getting clear on language: grouping doesn't mean small group, it means engineering instruction for student success. I introduced this idea of instructional precision as the goal, not perfection, but precision. We want to go beyond just explicit teaching. We want to move to highly targeted data-informed decision making because that's how we're really going to move the needle in an impressive way. I walked you through some practical steps. Gather meaningful data using spelling assessment, analyse the data, form the groups with the most experienced teachers taking the highest need students, and prepare your logistics so that the launch is smooth. Build in evaluation cycles from the start. There's a lot of practical detail that sits underneath all of this, but we only have so long in a podcast episode. So as I said, this kind of detail is going to be put together in a little e-book. And I'll be sharing details of that when it's ready.

Until then, remember that we're aiming for excellence, not perfection, because perfection, my friends, does not exist. I don't have every answer for your school. I don't know every situation that you're encountering. But what I do know is that you've got this. Common sense, intelligent decisions are the ones that get the job done. And your data will always be the guide of whether your decision is on the money. Remember that we need to align the evidence, what makes sense to us as professionals, and what looks after us as professionals. If we're creating waves of complexity that just do nothing but add to teacher workload, that's not a solution. And the third element is the impact on the students. Look at their well being as well as the data. And with this as your guiding light, everything's going to be fine. Until I see you next time, happy teaching. Bye.

Show Notes:

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