The Fountas and Pinnell Prompting Guide

In The Fountas and Pinnell Prompting Guide: A Tool for Literacy Teachers, Part 1 the authors provide a resource for teachers to aid in getting to know their students as individual readers and writers and then intentionally make instructional decisions to meet the needs of students. In the introduction they explain, "Your role is to notice each student's precise reading and writing behaviors and provide teaching that supports change in what she can do over time. As you infer from the behaviors how a reader or writer is building a system of strategic actions, you can make effective instructional decisions" (tab 1). I love that the authors refer to it as inferring from behaviors; I had not thought about it with that term, but it is precisely what teachers do when closely paying attention to students.

The guide is constructed on thick paper with a cover that can be used to set the guide up on a table for teachers to easily flip through it utilizing the convenient tabs during instruction. The tabs provide various summarized focal teaching points for both reading and writing, including left/right, voice-print, word beginnings, rate pausing, placing words, and monitoring/correcting. In addition, each tab lists the broader goals such as early reading behaviors, general problem-solving, and constructing words.

The pages have an easy to follow lay-out that is simple in order to avoid making the page too busy. Each section provides a brief introduction and instructions for teachers about what to observe in students. They also have headings with the full versions of the focal teaching points, as opposed to the condensed versions on the tabs. The pages are divided into three columns under each heading that mirror the cover words and color scheme: teach (in purple), prompt (in red), and reinforce (in green).

It is clear that Fountas and Pinnell decided to keep a clean, crisp layout to match their purpose of classroom utility vs. other professional development resources meant to provide detailed explanations. While the resource on its own is powerful, it would be even more advantageous for those using it to have a rich foundation in literacy learning as well. Luckily, the authors provide a list of professional references in the introduction which will be valuable for teachers who do not yet feel confident with their level of understanding behind the teaching points in this prompting guide.

The product is marketed as a scaffold for k-6 teachers. While some of the tabs are definitely relevant only to emergent literacy, such as reading left to right or the verbal path for letter formation, I agree that many of the other tabs are appropriate and helpful for the upper grades. As a mom, I appreciate the resources for younger grades because it is farther from my comfort zone when it comes to literacy. For example, the verbal path for letter formation is helpful because I have never had to explain how to form letters as my students already know how, so it is a tool that will help me as a parent.

Fountas and Pinnell also have the prompting guide available with Spanish components for bilingual literacy teachers. Tomorrow I will post more about that version.

Copy provided by the publisher