Responsive ELA Teaching Strategies

Educators often ask me, “What’s the most important variable in improving students’ reading achievement?” I always answer, “The teacher.” No matter how well researched (and I am a firm believer in research-informed classroom practices), well designed, or thorough a core reading program or English language arts (ELA) curriculum is, in the end it’s the teacher’s artfulness and skill that has the greatest impact on student learning.

We teachers must draw on knowledge of our students and then modify lesson plans accordingly and make in-the-moment decisions to react to the needs of the students in front of us. One of the topics I explore in my new book, Teaching Reading Across the Day, is elements of responsive teaching. 

Selecting the Right Lesson Type

Responsive teaching begins with your lesson planning. You’ll want to think about the text, task, and objectives (content, vocabulary, and skills) of your reading lesson, along with your readers’ skills and background knowledge, and consider the best lesson type to help them meet the objectives. There are nine types of lessons I choose from: shared reading, reader’s theater, close reading, read aloud, guided inquiry, phonics and spelling, vocabulary, focus, or conversation lessons. Each offers different supports and opportunities for feedback. Here are some examples:

Developing fluency: When students need support with their automaticity, phrasing, or prosody, you might use the text from the core program and select a shared-reading lesson where you will lead students in choral or echo reading, pausing to prompt them to reread, stop and think, and/or notice punctuation. Alternatively, you might choose a reader’s theater lesson where students read and reread short texts such as scripts and speeches in groups, while you provide them with strategies, feedback, and coaching. 

Providing extra support with comprehension of complex texts: If you are planning a lesson from a core program and notice that a text is complex and beyond what students are able to read independently, you might choose a lesson type that offers more support for the students who need it, such as a close-reading lesson. You’ll provide the group of students with additional scaffolding through frequent pauses and prompting, as well as strategies to help them think through deeper meanings in the text. You’ll also be able to offer redirections and impromptu models as needed. 

Using Skill Progressions

When planning any reading lesson, think through how skills progress as students increase in proficiency. Preparing a skill progression ahead of time can help you assess and adjust your instruction in the moment.  For example, if students are working to articulate a main idea of a section of text as a first step toward developing their summarizing skills in a read-aloud lesson, you might use a progression like this one, adapted from my two most recent books:

Students can name a topic→ identify a main idea stated in a text→  infer a simple main idea→ infer a complex main idea, taking structure into account. 

As you teach, you can monitor students’ responses to your questions and prompts and decide what to do next, using the progression as a guide. For example: 

Using a skill progression to assess during a turn-and-talk: After reading aloud a section of an article, you might ask students, “What was this part mostly about?” As they turn and talk, you may notice that many are saying, simply, “Pollution.” Using the skill progression, you can determine that they are naming  a topic. Their next step would be to then identify a main idea stated in the text. You might teach a strategy such as looking for an overview statement in an introduction. 

Using a skill progression to assess students’ writing: As you assign students to work in partners to annotate the rest of the article by jotting the main idea of each section in the margin, you might circulate to assess what they’ve written. If you notice that a group’s note next to a section that overviews the causes of and possible solutions for plastic pollution in the ocean says, “Plastic pollution in the ocean is bad,” the progression can guide you to teach them how to revise their simple idea to be more complex and better reflect the text’s structure.

Anticipating Likely Responses and Creating an If-Then Tool Kit

As part of your planning, you can think ahead about where your students might need redirection, some corrective feedback, or positive reinforcement and develop a tool kit of what you might say and do in response. I often create these as if-then charts. 

For example, in a phonics and spelling lesson, you might ask students to decode a series of isolated words to give them practice applying previously learned concepts. If you hear them mumble through a word, you might respond by prompting them to support successive blending: “Say the first sound. Now say the first and second. Now say the first, second, and one after that.” Alternatively, you might prompt with continuous blending: “Say each sound, sliding into the next.” 

What about if you lose their attention and they start getting wiggly or looking away? Perhaps then you’ll respond by picking up the pace, taking a quick movement break, or wrapping up the lesson early and continuing at another time. 

What if you dictate a word for them to spell, and their spelling is plausible based on their knowledge of grapheme-phoneme correspondences but not correct? Then, maybe you’ll respond by saying, “Yes, one way to spell the sound ___ is with the letters ___. In this word, that sound is spelled ___.”

If there is one thing we can count on as teachers, it is that our students will surprise us no matter how carefully we have planned by choosing a lesson type, creating a skill progression, or anticipating likely responses. Responsive teaching will require flexibility and an ability to pivot. For example, you’ll no doubt be watching and listening to students, thinking, “Are they getting it? Are they with me? What’s confusing? Are they engaged?” 

Depending on what you hear and observe, you might stray from your plans, deciding to pick up the pace, or back up, slow down, and offer an extra explanation or demonstration. Response is critical to any lesson: Your students respond to you, and you respond to them. Responsiveness is key to making our lessons artful, human, and effective.