DETERMINING AND DELIVERING STRONG “MAGIC THREE” QUESTIONS
Jaclyn DeForge, our Resident Literacy Expert, began her career teaching first and second grade in the South Bronx, and went on to become a literacy coach and earn her Masters of Science in Teaching. In this series for teachers, educators, and literacy coaches, Jaclyn discusses different strategies for ensuring students hit end-of-year benchmarks in reading.
I’ve talked about how to set individual reading goals for students, the importance of student motivation and regular assessment and, most recently, about turning the running record assessment time into a meaningful conference by sending students back to their seats with their own personal “Magic Three,” a set of three questions to focus on while they read. So where do “Magic Three” questions come from?
I pull them from a few different places: guided reading notes, struggles I’ve noticed during the most recent running record assessment, and sometimes, from my most recent Read Aloud mini-lessons. I limit the questions to three, because I’ve found it’s a manageable number for even the youngest of readers, and it eliminates questions of fairness and builds a sense of the learning community within the classroom, as every student walks away from their running record conference with the same number of next steps.
When selecting which strategies to highlight for each student, I want to keep the following guidelines for myself in mind:
- Is this a strategy I’ve worked on with them before or introduced to the class?
- Is this something I feel confident they can try on their own? Can they somewhat monitor their own success in implementing this strategy?
When delivering the “Magic Three” to each student, I’m a fan of the infamous “compliment sandwich” technique. It’s easier to hear where we need to improve after hearing how awesome we are! Here’s how a hypothetical post-conference “Magic Three” talk might go with one of my former second graders:
“Erika, I just wanted to tell you that I have been so impressed with you lately during Guided Reading time. I’ve noticed you taking some really thoughtful notes as you read, and I like that you always go back to the text to support your answer. That’s a strategy really thoughtful readers use and I’m excited to see how your careful attention to detail helps you as we start working on level L books. Now for our “Magic Three” until we sit again: the first thing I want you to think about when you read a fiction book is character. It’s really important that every time you read a book, you ask yourself:
How would I describe each character to someone who had never met them?
You’re so good at helping your classmates come up with support for the adjectives they come up with to describe the characters we’ve read about, but I would love to see you start coming up with the describing words, and let your classmates come up with the support, since that’s already something you’re good at. So what are you going to focus on when you think about the characters?
The other thing I want you to focus on is unfamiliar or confusing words: even as an adult, I come across words in my reading that I’ve never seen before, but I can’t let that scare me and stop me from understanding what’s going on in the text. I’ve noticed, and a lot of your friends do this too, that when you come to a word you don’t know, you’ll skip it and keep going. As the books we read start to get a bit more challenging, those words we skip over might be important to understanding what’s going on, so it’s really important that if you come to a word you don’t know right away, that you try to figure out what the word is and what the word means. So the two questions I want you to ask yourself when you come to a word you don’t know are:
Did I try to sound it out or look for other words and word parts I already know to help me figure out what the word is?
Did I read around the word (the sentence before and the sentence after) to try to figure out what the word means?
Those are your “Magic Three.” So what are the three things you’re focusing on this month?
Thank you so much for taking the time to read with me today. I’ve noticed how you’ve been speaking up and answering questions a lot more during Read Aloud. You’ve shared some pretty spectacular insights and I think your careful listening is really contributing some great thoughts and questions to our discussions, so thank you for that!”
How do you communicate next steps to your students? Drop me an email at [email protected] or share yours in the comments!
Filed under:
Curriculum Corner,
Resources Tagged:
guided reading,
magic three,
next steps,
questions for readers,
reading conference,
setting reading goals 
Empowerment Post-Assessment
Jaclyn DeForge, our Resident Literacy Expert, began her career teaching first and second grade in the South Bronx, and went on to become a literacy coach and earn her Masters of Science in Teaching. In this series for teachers, educators, and literacy coaches, Jaclyn discusses different strategies for ensuring students hit end-of-year benchmarks in reading.
Two weeks ago, I shared with you some resources to use when determining a reading goal for each student, and last week I talked about how to motivate students about their reading goal and about how to 
schedule out regular assessment. Today, I want to get into the nuts and bolts of the running record assessment time, and how to create a post-assessment conference that really empowers students.
The first part of my assessment time with each individual student is the assessment itself. Once I’ve determined the student’s independent reading level (each assessment program differs in terms of what a student needs to score to be considered independent), I take out a secondary assessment kit and read with the student on their instructional level to determine each student’s “Magic Three.” The “Magic Three” are the three reading comprehension skills and strategies I’m going to send that student off with to focus on during their independent reading time between now and the next assessment.
When reading with a student on their instructional reading level, I consider the following:
“The word reading has two senses, often confusingly lumped together. The first means the process of turning printed marks into sounds and these sounds into words. But the second sense means the very different process of understanding those words. Learning how to read in the first sense—decoding through phonics—does not guarantee learning how to read in the second sense—comprehending the meaning of what is read…[c]hildren who lag in comprehension in early grades tend to fall even further behind in later years.”
E.D. Hirsch, Jr. The Knowledge Deficit
Different running record assessment systems have different accuracy benchmarks, but when I do running record with a student, only a small percentage of what I’m looking for has to do with decoding. On the whole, I’ve found students can decode at a far higher level than they can comprehend, so this usually isn’t a factor when dealing with a student’s instructional level. What I look for is: a) do they comprehend the story on a BASIC level? and b) how much of the story were they able to EXTEND to comprehend on a deeper level? Most students, when they’re reading at their instructional level, may have a few minor problems with the basic comprehension, but really tend to st
Educational Sales Associate Jaclyn DeForge began her career teaching first and second grade in the South Bronx, and went on to become a literacy coach and earn her Masters of Science in Teaching. In this series for teachers, educators, and literacy coaches, Jaclyn discusses different strategies for ensuring students hit end-of-year benchmarks in reading.
These days, the words testing or assessment tend to bring up many conflicting emotions among educators, but determining where your students need to be at the end of the year and how you (the teacher)are going to keep track of individual progress toward each standard is a key part of proactive planning.
With my students, it was really important to me that they feel ownership of their success by being able to clearly see how their actions
affected their achievement, so we did a lot of individualized goal setting and consistently measured our progress toward said goals. The result was a classroom full of empowered children who were aware of where they were strong and what they needed to work on, and confident in the knowledge that there was a plan as to how we were going to get there. This transparency in teaching can absolutely yield huge rewards, but it does take some proactive planning.
Over the next several weeks, my posts will be dedicated to the goal setting process in reading: where to set each goal, when to assess, how to keep track of progress toward the goal, and how to set each student up with concrete steps toward reaching their goal through the running records assessment and reading conferencing.
When reflecting on the “where” (i.e. what you would like each individual student’s independent reading level to be at the close of the school year), the Common Core Standards directly address text level complexity, and provide specific Lexile Levels ranges of where students should be reading by the end of the year to hit the standard. Quick summary:
- 2nd – 3rd graders are expected to be able to read and comprehend books that fall within the 450-790 complexity band (approximately levels L-P), 2nd graders with scaffolding and 3rd graders independently.
- 4th and 5th graders are expected to be able to read and comprehend books that fall within the 770-980 complexity band (approximately levels O-V), 4th graders with scaffolding and 5th graders independently.
From this, we can infer that K-1st graders need to be able to read and comprehend books that fall within the 200-450 complexity band (approximately levels A-K), kindergarteners with scaffolding and 1st graders independently. For more information, directly consult the Common Core Standards, Appendix A, page 8. I’ve attached a chart that approximates what a 1/2 a year, a year, a year and a 1/2, and 2 years of reading growth look like from each beginning of year reading level as a guide.
Here are a few questions to mull over when considering where to set individual student goals:
- How far behind do you anticipate your students to be? Or conversely, how fa
Jaclyn DeForge, our Resident Literacy Expert, began her career teaching first and second grade in the South Bronx, and went on to become a literacy coach and earn her Masters of Science in Teaching. In this series for teachers, educators, and literacy coaches, Jaclyn discusses different strategies for ensuring students hit end-of-year benchmarks in reading.
