One of the most difficult challenges that a teacher can face is trying to teach students to read. Since there are so many letters of the alphabet, sounds, and words to remember, young students find this process extremely difficult.
For this reason, many teachers wonder whether or not it is better to teach students how to read as a class or in smaller groups. In this article, we will discuss the matter and refer to a few advantages and disadvantages of each.
Teaching Reading To Students
As we have already mentioned, teaching a class to read can be a challenging task. While students begin memorizing sounds and words from very early on in their life, they often cannot read until the age of 7.
With that being said, to achieve this, they will need to be exposed to various reading materials, such as children’s books.
To make the process of teaching a class to read much easier, many teachers teach the students all at once. However, some teachers believe that this does not meet the students’ individual needs – for this reason, they prefer smaller group lessons.
Whole-Class Teaching
There are a few advantages to using whole-class teaching. The main benefit that teachers will experience is that the lessons will be much quicker and they won’t have to repeat the same section of work repeatedly for different students. However, this mostly benefits the teacher and not the students.
If your class is relatively small, there may not be a need to break it down into smaller groups. Some students may prefer whole class teaching as it does not put so much pressure on them.
Small-Group Teaching
Small-group teaching may be inconvenient for the teacher, but it shouldn’t be too much of an issue if they are passionate about their job. This type of lesson plan works best when the class is very large. Teaching thirty or more young children to read at one time could seem all but impossible.
However, the teacher must give the other groups of students work to do while teaching another group. If they fail to do this, the rest of the students could begin to feel left out or neglected.
Concluding Thoughts
There are benefits and disadvantages to small group and whole class lessons. In general, whole-class lessons work perfectly if the class is relatively small.
On the other hand, small group lessons are better for large classes. Teachers mustn’t neglect the other students during small group lessons.
