In partner reading and guided reading, it is critically important that students read silently, rather than students or the teacher reading aloud. Silent independent reading builds students’ stamina, decoding, fluency and comprehension skills. When students - especially struggling readers - read aloud, they are so focused on the performance aspect of pronouncing all the words correctly that they don’t have the mental energy left over to focus on comprehension. Reading aloud can also cause a lot of anxiety and stress for struggling readers. And finally, when a partner is following along with a disfluent reader, that partner is forced into disfluent reading habits, with their eyes tracing back over words and phrases that their partner repeats, or being forced to read more slowly than they are capable of. To support students to read silently, STARI breaks longer texts into small chunks with frequent opportunities for discussion with the teacher or with peers. These discussions allow frequent checks for understanding. Chunks of text increase in size over the course of the curriculum, allowing students to build stamina for silent reading. Sometimes, the teacher lesson plans prompt the teacher to read aloud to students, particularly at the beginning of a unit or when introducing a new text. This is to help students “get into” the text so they are motivated to do the silent reading. And of course students read fluency passages aloud to one another. But the vast majority of the reading of novels and nonfiction texts should take place silently.

Guided/communal reading in STARI happens with the whole group unless a teacher has decided to divide their class into two groups. If your STARI class is larger than 14 students, we recommend considering running two groups for guided reading. See the Unit 1 Teacher Lesson Plans section on Guided Reading, which includes tips on running two groups. If you decide to divide your class into two groups, the other students can be completing partner work while you are leading a guided reading group.

The STARI program’s philosophy is that students benefit more from learning just a few strategies, with lots of practice, rather than learning a large variety of strategies. Students are taught to use the 5 Ws as a tool for summarizing text. Summarizing is the first comprehension strategy taught, and it is used throughout each Series. It is paired with Clarifying (in Unit 1), Predicting (in Unit 2) and Questioning (in Unit 3). Additionally, students are providing prompts for summarizing text-based arguments during debate preparation and participation.

Yes. This strategy is taught during Unit 1 of each Series. Sometimes students use sticky notes to record words, sometimes they are directed to underline or write words down for clarification.

STARI teachers have reported that student absences are the single biggest challenge they face. Of course, when students are absent, they miss valuable learning time. But to mitigate the effects of student absences, we have developed lesson-by-lesson summaries for the core novel in each STARI unit, available on the SERP Download Center. When a student returns from an absence, they can read the novel summaries for the lessons they missed. While this doesn’t replace reading the text itself, the summaries will allow them to participate in the day’s discussion rather than spending class time feeling disconnected.