What is Coached Practice?
Coached Practice meets students where they are as readers in small groups or one-on-one. The teacher follows the lead of the readers, invites them to do the work of reading, carefully observes where readers are gaining proficiency or need support and coaches responsively. This time may be used for explicit language comprehension teaching, phonics, or word solving strategy practice. Learners do not need to be reading the same book to be coached together. Groupings are flexible and based on skills to be practiced or explicitly taught, rather than text reading levels.
Why?
Small group instruction provides learners with targeted instruction with more teacher attention and feedback. Students get opportunities to practice strategies introduced in read-aloud and shared reading as they work through the text mostly independently. Coached practice offers teachers the unique opportunity to observe students’ reading processes in action, catch inefficiencies before they become habituated, and explicitly teach language and literacy skills in response to the needs of learners.
During Coached Practice:
| Teachers are... | Learners are... |
|---|---|
| thoughtfully organizing flexible & fluid groupings by skill, not text level | doing most of the work integrating print and meaning |
| observing students read | practicing strategies previously taught & practiced in shared reading |
| thoughtfully selecting texts for readers | reading a text at instructional level (90-94% accuracy) |
| offering thoughtful prompts and coaching cues to support learners' problem-solving | referring to anchor charts co-created during shared reading, as appropriate |
| responsively teaching language, word-solving or phonics skills | receiving "in-the-moment" teaching |
| using observations to inform next instructional steps | receiving targeted instruction and practice with teacher feedback |
