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Entrusting teachers with student-centered instruction: a review

of The Reading Strategies Book by Jennifer Serravallo

Article · January 2016

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 Entrusting Teachers with Student-Centered
Instruction:
A Review of The Reading Strategies Book by
Jennifer Serravallo
Rebecca Benjamin
Schenectady City School District
University at Albany, State University of New York

Abstract
The Reading Strategies Book, by Jennifer Serravallo, is a tool that
offers support to teachers in their planning and execution of literacy
lessons situated within a larger curricula. The goal-oriented chapters
address a plethora of strategies that can be taught in all genres, grades,
and content areas, and they are differentiated for the teacher by clear
descriptions that assist them in selecting the most apt and applicable
lessons.

Introduction This resource provides teachers with an “Ev-

The task of designing and implement-
ing an appropriate scope and sequence for
a curriculum has always been a substantial
and daunting undertaking. Recent initiatives,
such as the Common Core State Standards
and Race to the Top, have done even more
to increase the pressure and demands on ed-
ucators. These statutes mandate higher levels
of literacy throughout all grade and content
areas. They ask students to read critically, de-
fend arguments with text evidence, make in-
ferences, demonstrate understanding through
performance, and engage with higher levels
of text at earlier ages and across all subject ar-
eas (Phillips & Wong, 2012). Now, more than
ever, the curriculum design and tools utilized
by teachers need to be purposeful, high-qual-
ity, and well-aligned with the objectives and
goals set for each valuable lesson.
The Reading Strategies Book, by Jennifer
Serravallo, is a tool that offers support to
teachers in their planning and execution of lit-
eracy lessons situated within a larger curricula.
45
erything guide to developing skilled readers,”
(Serravallo, 2015). Throughout this book,
several (over 300) strategies are presented in
the form of lessons that are accompanied by
teaching tips, lesson language, and supportive
prompts for the teachers that help guide the
students towards independence. The strate-
gies, which cover a plethora of topics from
going on “word treasure hunts” to making
“idea connections,” are provided in the form
of lessons that could be applied to a wide va-
riety of subject matter.
Serravallo does not provide a scope and
sequence of content to be covered in various
grades, nor does she recommend specific
lesson books, reading materials, approaches,
programs, or interventions. This more general
format is far less restrictive to the teachers
utilizing the strategy lessons in this book, as
it allows for easy application regardless of the
content area, grade placement, or reading lev-
el of the students. Additionally, these strategy
lessons do not require teachers to complete
any specific types of assessment to determine
46 / Reading Improvement
which lessons are applicable, they do not
require teachers to provide a certain num-
ber of lessons delivered in a specific order,
and they do not require any specific content
or reading materials. The flexibility of this
book maximizes its utility to a wider range
of teachers, while trusting the expertise of
educators themselves and allowing them to
instruct students in the strategies and con-
tent that their professional evaluations deem
most necessary.
Serravallo compares her Reading Strat-
egies Book to a cookbook, and notes that
teachers can use this book to select lessons
appropriate for each particular situation.
The lessons are presented as “recipes” for
instruction, with directions on how to model,
guide, and prompt students in a new skill. The
organization of the strategy lessons in this
book guides teachers to the categories that
might be suitable for their students, given
their performance on various common bench-
marks and formative assessments.
The lessons themselves are arranged in
this book by goals, which align well with
teacher planning processes and requirements.
The lessons work to provide differentiated
instruction to students based on their current
levels, needs, and abilities, as determined by
a battery of available formative assessments.
Initiatives, such as Race to the Top, have
been accompanied by Annual Professional
Performance Reviews (APPR), which include
Student Learning Objectives (SLOs) as a data
point to evaluate the effectiveness of student
educators. With this current focus on teaching
objectives, a strategy book organized by spe-
cific goals that students can learn, apply, and
demonstrate over time is especially pertinent.
The teaching goals presented in The Read-
ing Strategies Book are organized in a loose
manner by reading readiness levels and content
focus, and each strategy lesson is accompanied
by a recommendation for the guided reading
level with which it would be most effective
(i.e. “any” or “K and above”). Serravallo is
adamant that the teachers employing this
book possess the expertise to determine which
strategy lessons are the most fitting for their
students, given the amount of information that
the teachers acquire from student observation,
assessment performance, lesson engagement,
and local curriculum implementation.
While Serravallo defines teaching goals
through the titles of each of the 13 chapters
in The Reading Strategies Book, teachers
themselves are tasked with identifying the
various skills that different students may need
to acquire in order to meet those goals. The
chapters are titled:
Goal #1: Supporting Pre-Emergent and
Emergent Readers
Goal #2: Teaching Reading Engagement:
Focus, Stamina, and Building a Read-
ing Life
Goal #3: Supporting Print Work: Increas-
ing Accuracy and Integrating Sources
of Information
Goal #4: Teaching Fluency: Reading with
Phrasing, Intonation, and Automaticity
Goal #5: Supporting Comprehension
in Fiction: Understanding Plot and
Setting
Goal #6: Supporting Comprehension in
Fiction: Thinking About Characters
Goal #7: Supporting Comprehension in
Fiction: Understanding Themes and
Ideas
Goal #8: Supporting Comprehension in
Nonfiction: Determining Main Top-
ic(s) and Main Idea(s)
Goal #9: Supporting Comprehension in
Nonfiction: Determining Key Details
Goal #10: Supporting Comprehension in
Nonfiction: Getting the Most from Text
Features
 A Review Of The Reading Strategies Book By Jennifer Serravallo / 47
Goal #11: Improving Comprehension in
Fiction and Nonfiction: Understanding
Vocabulary and Figurative Language
Goal #12: Supporting Students’ Conversa-
tions: Speaking, listening, and Deepen-
ing Comprehension
Goal #13: Improving Writing About
Reading
Each of these goals is then broken into
strategy lessons intended to make certain
reader actions and behaviors explicit, as an
aid in developing skills that assist in meet-
ing the comprehensive goal. For instance,
the overall chapter goal of “Teaching Fluen-
cy” contains strategy lessons to “Make the
Bumpy Smooth,” “Make Your Voice Match
the Feeling,” “Get Your Eyes Ahead of the
Words,” and “Snap to the Next Line,” (p. iv).
The strategy lessons provided are intended to
supply students with “a step-by-step, a proce-
dure or recipe” to make the actions of reading
“visible” and “more comfortable” (p. 8) in the
service of gaining reading automaticity (Sar-
ravallo, 2015).
The Reading Strategies Book, by provid-
ing strategy lessons intended for teachers to
select and deliver to their students, is a tool
that promotes educator knowledge of their
students’ abilities. Once teachers are aware
of the needs that their students have, they can
select leveled reading material to pair with
a strategy lesson. The lesson will explicitly
demonstrate the process of learning and ap-
plying a certain skill, while working towards
a higher literacy goal.
This curriculum resource provides oppor-
tunities for teachers to utilize the knowledge
of their students, which they already possess,
and apply that to the task of selecting a strat-
egy lesson. The ideal selection results in a
lesson that is within the student’s supported
range of cognitive reasoning (zone of prox-
imal development), provides them with a
foundation of skills which they can apply to
literacy activities, and pushes them a suitable
amount to help them make the greatest gains
possible (Bruner, 1966; Piaget, 1950; Fani &
Ghaemi, 2011; Vygotsky, 1978).
This book, by virtue of encouraging
educators to select and teach lessons based
on student needs, abilities, and potential,
supports the paradigm of a learner-centered
curriculum. Learner-centered curricula have
often attributed their beginnings to Dewey’s
(1902) proposition that, “The child is the
starting-point, the center, and the end. His
development, his growth, is the ideal,” (p.
8). Serravallo (2015) herself states that, “We
must meet children where they are, we must
understand them well to teach them, and we
must offer them the right amounts of supports
and challenges to grow,” (p. 19).
This philosophy classifies The Reading
Strategies Book as a curriculum resource with
a child-centered view of implementation. It
advises educators to observe their students
and collect information that will inform their
teaching (Dewey, 1902), and then proposes
that those teachers differentiate instruction
based on student needs. This is aligned with
current Response to Intervention (RTI) and
Academic Intervention Services (AIS) initia-
tives (Scanlon & Sweeney, 2008), which re-
quire educators to support students by teach-
ing them material that they are currently ready
to approach. The lessons that the students are
prepared to understand will contain some in-
formation that the students already recognize
as part of their personal cognitive schema,
and the step-by-step strategy instruction will
help them to construct new knowledge and
skill-sets from that starting point (Bruner,
1966; Piaget, 1950).
The developmentally appropriate practice
that this resource promotes is aligned with
a differentiated instruction permutation of
the learner-centered curriculum. Ellis (2004)
describes a developmentally appropriate
practice as one that requires the teacher to
48 / Reading Improvement
carefully observe their students in order to
determine their “likes and dislikes, levels
of maturity, and strengths and weaknesses,”
(p. 46). Learning centers are often present
in elementary classrooms, where groups of
students work together in designated areas on
an assigned task, while the classroom teacher
works with a reading group. Learning center
instruction, where educators prepare various
tasks for students to complete in small groups
based on interest and ability, are a dominant
form of this learner-centered curriculum per-
mutation (Ellis, 2004).
The Reading Strategies Book is designed
to provide teachers with appropriately leveled
lessons that can be applied in these small-
group center sessions. In the American edu-
cation system, elementary reading instruction
is typically taught in small groups to students
classified at similar levels. These small groups
frequently take place during center rotations,
allowing a teacher to devote their attention
to supporting one group at a time through a
lesson within their zones of proximal devel-
opment that allows them to make the greatest
strides in their reading achievement. Students
who may benefit from remedial support ser-
vices in literacy might receive two centers’
worth of time in small groups with teach-
er-guided instruction. The Reading Strategies
Book lessons could be used for this purpose
by the classroom and remedial teacher alike.
Their students will demonstrate more growth
if the educators collaborate, and are aligned in
the instructional language and concepts that
they present to students (Johnston, 2010).
One of the major tenets of a learner-cen-
tered curriculum includes following the inter-
ests of the student (Ellis, 2004). Ellis (2004)
notes that the Doctrine of Interest introduced
by Quintilian in the 1st Century A.D. expressed
the idea that, “forcing students to learn things
they are not particularly interested in is large-
ly a waste of everyone’s time,” (p. 47). Ser-
ravallo acknowledges learner engagement as
critical for effective instruction, and attends to
this in her second chapter goal of “Teaching
Reader Engagement” (which is the first goal
she recommends addressing after students
have really started interacting with texts as
“readers” beyond the emergent stages). Addi-
tionally, the strategy lessons presented in The
Reading Strategies Book could be applied to
content information and reading materials
that focus on student-selected and high-inter-
est topics.
This book supports teachers in selecting
appropriate lessons for different groups of
students by providing lesson information that
can be matched to data gained from student
observations and assessments. Teachers can
then utilize that information in the larger
context of their administrative initiatives,
requirements, and resources, to determine the
most ideal instruction.
The combination of research and resource
that is presented in this book allows teachers
access to the most prolific and effective teach-
ing points that have been established in the
field of literacy education.
For new and developing teachers, this
book imparts incredibly valuable information.
It focuses on clear and precise lessons that
support student construction (and application)
of new literacy skill-sets. The unambiguous
descriptions of the goals, strategies, levels,
genres, and skills provided in each lesson will
aid teachers in matching lessons to student
needs. The teaching tips, lesson language, and
prompts model highly effective ways to com-
municate new ideas and guide young learners
towards independence.
Overall, The Reading Strategies Book, by
Jennifer Serravallo, is an incredible teaching
tool for educators of any level of experience,
who teach any facet of literacy. The goal-ori-
ented chapters address a plethora of skills
that can be taught in all genres, grades, and
content areas, and they are differentiated for
the teacher by clear descriptions that assist
 A Review Of The Reading Strategies Book By Jennifer Serravallo / 49
them in selecting the most apt and applicable
lessons. Perhaps most valuable, this book
provides teachers with an easily accessible
quick-reference to years of research in litera-
cy education. Serravallo avoids any perceived
restrictions that might have resulted if she had
referenced some current curriculum require-
ments (i.e. Common Core State Standards) by
presenting logically-organized and high-qual-
ity teaching techniques detached from any
program or standard alignment.
Serravallo encourages teachers to, “Be
secure in the knowledge that your teaching
will match your child, and it will inevitably
also help the child reach higher standards,”
(p. 19). New teachers will find the comfort
of high-quality starting points; experienced
teachers will find additional and specific ways
to differentiate instruction for their learners;
all teachers will find a flexible resource that
encourages educators to trust, implement, and
build upon their existing expertise.
References
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