Meet students where they are.With Small Group Strategies, you can effectively guide students in your small group toward the most important relationship they will ever have—a lifelong relationship with Christ. Respected authors Laurie Polich and Charley Scandlyn offer 30-plus years of collective youth ministry experience to these proven ideas, which offer:•a strategic approach to small group ministry•hundreds of ideas to reach students at every level•practical applications that foster spiritual growthMeet your students where they are in life. You have the heart. You have the vision. Here are the ideas you need to make it happen.

Meet instructional challenges effectively and efficiently by uncovering hidden time for meeting individual students' needs. With small groups, you'll work closely with more children each day with her how-tos on using formative assessment to create groups from common needs; differentiating for individuals, even in a group; and enhancing Tier 1 and Tier 2 instruction.

Drawing on years of experience, the authors address the questions that educators may have about teaching small groups in the health professions. The first half of the book focuses on practical strategies involved in planning and facilitating learning in small groups. The authors discuss the characteristics of effective groups and emphasize the importance of using a collaborative approach. The second half focuses on planning for leading small groups that have specific purposes, such as providing a forum for discussion and dialogue, teaching communication skills, and helping learners to reflect on their patient care experience, and more. The book's broad orientation and practical emphasis will be useful to all educator in health care.

Small groups are a great way to promote the spiritual formation of church attendees. But leading them well can be hard work, especially if you don't have a plan. This practical resource helps pastors and small group point people develop and implement a 12- to 18-month strategic plan for their ministries in order to keep it healthy and growing. Developed at Saddleback Church, this completely customizable plan works for any church size and any denomination. Readers answer 22 questions that help them understand their vision, the purpose of their ministry, and how to connect members, grow numerically and spiritually, measure progress, develop leaders, create opportunities to serve, and much more. By the time they're done, readers will have developed their own personalized planner for the next year to 18 months so that they can feel prepared, confident, and purposeful about their small group ministry.

When done right, small-group instruction is a powerful tool for facilitating student understanding in K-5 mathematics. Throughout the book, best practices for small-group math instruction are addressed in detail, from planning tasks that encourage deep understanding to asking effective questions to engaging learners in meaningful conversations. Readers will learn how teaching mathematics in small groups allows you to differentiate instruction for both remediation and enrichment. The included small-group instruction videos demonstrate the suggested strategies in a real-classroom setting, giving readers the opportunity to see best practice in action. Develop math-specific instruction strategies for teaching small groups in elementary school: Explore the benefits of small-group math activities and how these activities are unique compared to large-group instruction. Discover the teacher's and students' roles in small-group instruction and how teachers can help students develop the skills to fulfill their role. Learn how to apply the general tasks, questions, and evidence (TQE) process to small-group instruction in order to enhance student learning and improve your knowledge of teaching mathematics. View examples of small-group instruction, which provide both math intervention and math enrichment activities for different students. Contents: Acknowledgments Table of Contents About the Authors Introduction Chapter 1: Best Practices in Small-Group Instruction Chapter 2: The TQE Process in Small-Group Instruction Chapter 3: Discourse in Small-Group Instruction Epilogue: How to Tie It All Together References Index

Bring out daring readers with dynamic small groups! Like many educators in intermediate classrooms across the country, you may be using guided reading principles to teach reading. Whether you’re following targeted reading levels or sticking with your school’s established routines, chances are that guided reading has become synonymous with small group reading for you and your students. But . . . are your students getting the most out of small groups? Are readers of all ability levels experiencing the dynamic learning that can occur in small groups? Do you feel confident that the way you’re grouping kids is based on their wants and needs? Intermediate grade readers don’t need to be guided as much as they need to be engaged—and authors Julie Wright and Barry Hoonan have solutions for doing just that using small groups. What Are You Grouping For? offers the practical tools, classroom examples, and actionable steps essential for starting, sustaining, and mastering the management of small groups. This book explains the five teacher moves that work together to support students’ reading independence through small group learning—kidwatching, pivoting, assessing, curating, and planning—and provides examples to guide you and your students toward success. From must-have beginning-of-the-year strategies to step-by-step advice for implementation, this guide breaks down the processes that support small groups and help create effective instructional reading programs. Based on more than 45 years of combined experience in the classroom, this resource will empower you with tools to ensure that your readers are doing the reading, thinking, and doing—not you.

This edition features new material on such topics as skill-building for more advanced students and how to use multiple-ability treatments.

Intermediate grade readers are not an M, an N, or an O—they’re idea-wranglers, ready to comprehend when we honor who they are as thinkers first In 30 Big Idea Lessons for Small Groups, educators Rafferty, Morello, and Rountos provide an amazing framework that gets students interacting with texts. You prompt and guide, but they think! Big-Idea groups are the piece that’s been missing from small group instruction: engagement from the get-go. Follow this unique 4-part process to develop students’ literal, inferential, evaluative, and analytical skills: Engage: Before Reading Using a tactile tool like a topic card or a pyramid, readers literally move ideas around on their small group table as they debate a question related to the text and to big ideas about courage, persistence, love, and honesty, and more. Discuss: During Reading Students read and mark up a short text, exploring questions that get at the author’s take on the big idea, noticing key vocabulary, text structure, moments of inference, and more. Deep-See Think: After Reading Students re-read, synthesize, and revise their interpretations together and tweak the tactile tool, based on questions that probe the big idea in new and deeper ways. Connect: After Reading Students summarize, and begin to transfer their understandings to other texts in independent reading and the world beyond, primed for this all-important transfer because they’ve been engaged in topics that clearly relate to their lives. Tap into 30 lessons organized by text complexity, reproducible forms, assessments, and a bank of engagement tools so you can switch it up. Use these lessons across the year as a warm up to a whole-class novel, to augment your core reading program, to challenge your capable readers and bring your striving readers in to rich yet accessible reading experiences.