In this strategy guide, you’ll learn how to use kidwatching to track and support student learning. Teachers observe and take notes on students’ understanding of skills and concepts and then use the observations to determine effective strategies for future instruction.

Yetta Goodman popularized the term kidwatching, the practice of “watching kids with a knowledgeable head” (9). In kidwatching, teachers observe students’ activities, noticing how they learn and what they do to explore their ideas. Teachers then examine anecdotal notes and other evidence to see how and when students engage in learning. After this review, teachers use their observations to differentiate activities to meet the needs of individual students. The strategy is based on “a seek-to-understand stance by attempting to look at life, literacy, and learning through the children’s eyes” (Mills 2). By discovering how students learn, teachers are able to choose the most effective strategies for each pupil.

In this strategy, students read aloud to each other, pairing more fluent readers with less fluent readers. Likewise, this strategy can be used to pair older students with younger students to create “reading buddies.” Additionally, children who read at the same level can be paired to reread a text that they have already read, for continued understanding and fluency work. This research-based strategy can be used with any book or text in a variety of content areas, and can be implemented in a variety of ways.

In this strategy guide, you will learn how to organize students and texts to allow for learning that meets the diverse needs of students but keeps student groups flexible.

The research that originally gave credibility to the jigsaw approach—creating heterogeneous groups of students, diving them into new groups to become expert on a topic, and then returning them to their home groups—touted its value as a means of creating positive interdependence in the classroom and improving students’ attitudes toward school and each other.

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