It is worth noting that there can be downsides to providing instruction in small groups as well. The main trade-off to consider relates to the amount of teacher-led instruction students have access to overall: a whole-group lesson can be delivered to all students at the same time, whereas a small-group lesson of the same length only reaches a small proportion of the class. This is why it is important to find the right balance between whole-class and small-group instruction, and to use small-group instructional time intentionally (e.g., to provide opportunities for independent, collaborative practice of new knowledge or skills, for demonstrations that will be more effective up close, or for differentiation—to customize instruction such that it can meet diverse needs that cannot be met during a whole-class lesson). COMPONENTS OF SMALL-GROUP INSTRUCTION As part of her larger body of work focused on understanding how different students learn best within the same classroom, Dr. Carol Connor has been a key contributor to knowledge about small-group instruction and its impact on student outcomes. Connor and her colleagues identified four dimensions of instruction that, when provided in the appropriate, student-customized combination, maximize student growth in literacy (Connor et al., 2009a). Code-focused (CF) instruction is designed to teach children how to “crack the code” of printed words and addresses phonological awareness, grapheme-phoneme correspondence, phonics knowledge (i.e., the sounds corresponding to letters or letter combinations), decoding, and irregular word reading. Meaning-focused (MF) instruction supports students’ efforts to extract and construct meaning while reading connected text (Snow, 2002) and includes vocabulary knowledge, morpheme awareness, knowledge of print and text concepts, syntactic knowledge, and verbal reasoning (e.g., inference generation). The knowledge and skills addressed during code-focused and meaning-focused instruction are robust predictors of skilled reading (Duke & Cartwright, 2021; Gough & Tunmer, 1986; Scarborough, 2001). However, different children need them in different doses (i.e., some children benefit from a greater focus on code-focused knowledge and skills, and others benefit from a greater focus on meaning). Connor and her colleagues found that the impact of instruction was maximized when the content of instruction (i.e., the degree to which it was focused on cracking the code or constructing meaning) was customized to meet student needs (Al Otaiba et al., 2011; Connor et al., 2013; Connor et al., 2006).
ALIGNING PRACTICE WITH RESEARCH TOPIC PAPER 5
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