Implementing Comprehension Focus Groups at the Middle School Level

Today's post was contributed by Heather Zimmerman.

My role as a literacy coach changed a bit this year.  Instead of coaching at two middle school buildings, I am only at one building.  Yay!  But my new role involves both coaching and teaching two of our literacy skills focused classes.  One of these classes is at the seventh grade level, and the other class is at the eighth grade level.  I also push into a sixth grade classroom to work with struggling readers.  With the shift in my role, I am trying to learn how to balance both of these worlds. It is a difficult task to find the time to give 100% to both positions.  I am sure many of you can also relate to the feeling of knowing what is best for kids now as a reading specialist and feeling the need to be able to accomplish this on a daily basis with my students from amazing lesson plans to data analysis.

I was debating if I wanted to talk coaching or teaching, and I decided to go the teaching route.  I know literacy coaches have very different roles and some might appreciate my thoughts, either as a teacher or as a coach working with teachers.

This summer the grades 6-12 literacy coaches in my district went to a training by Carla Soffos on Comprehension Focus Groups (CFG).  This would be the set-up for our literacy skills classes. Besides reading a little blurb on CFG in Interventions that Work, I knew very little about CFG.  After the training my colleagues and I quickly started talking about how this might look at the 6-12 level. Besides collaborating with colleagues, the internet is usually my best friend when it comes to planning. From what I found though, there is very little out there on CFG at the secondary level.  I hope to share with you my journey this year with CFG.  I hope this provides a starting point for you, ideas to possibly implement, thoughts to think about, or probably some mistakes to avoid that I learned from.

I knew I wanted to use Notice and Note as a resource and implement Kylene Beers and Robert Probst’s signposts.  Since I read that book last year I was looking forward to working with teachers in using the signposts in their own classrooms.  I decided to teach all of the signposts first.  I was wondering if this was too much for my students.  I also was learning with the students, which was helpful and exciting as we started pulling out our first signposts together.  I liked that I taught all the signposts at first because it gave them many different options to look for.  It was also helpful because then the next day they could look for the signposts in their choice books, and I had time to do beginning of the year assessing.  (Of course we took some time establishing routines to make this successful.)  Studying the signposts also gave me insight on various mini-lessons I wanted to start with including theme, plot, and point of view.  I had to reassure my students that we would continue practicing the signposts and they would be easier to spot.  As we entered the first CFG my students were starting to find the signposts on their own.  I still go back and forth if I would teach all the signposts at once, but I feel the process is allowing for success in different ways.  I was able to finish testing by allowing them time to dive into their choice books and practice finding signposts, and students are now having time to work on finding the signpost and digging into the anchor questions. After looking at the advantages and disadvantages, I plan on keeping this part the same for next year.

In my next blog post, I will dive deeper into the first CFG.  After spending weeks looking for texts, I hope you will find some of my ideas helpful!