The Literacy Quick Guide: An Overview

With locating tabs, an intuitive page layout, and Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell's research-based thinking, The Literacy Quick Guide is a teacher's user-friendly tool for responsive teaching. Unlike any other teaching tool, The Literacy Quick Guide is a concise and to-the-point guide used for planning and structuring lessons, for thinking about how to appropriately and effectively choose texts, and for learning how to engage in responsive teaching in the most effective ways within the literacy-rich classroom. Teachers and educators can use this tool not only as the initial building block toward a cohesive, literacy-based classroom, but also as an ongoing reference tool for explicit teaching.

What is The Literacy Quick Guide?

The Literacy Quick Guide is a reference tool for responsive literacy teaching. It provides a concise description of a coherent literacy system in which all instructional contexts are reciprocally connected to improve student outcomes. The Literacy Quick Guide provides important information about the processes of reading, writing, talking, and word study, while describing research-based instructional practices for high-impact literacy teaching.

The Literacy Quick Guide is your guide to:

• Designing effective literacy instruction for your classroom, school, or district
• Planning instructional time to support literacy learning in a variety of contexts
• Organizing your classroom for effective, efficient literacy teaching
• Providing a rich, coherent instructional design for your teaching.

Who is this guide for?

PreK-8 teachers, literacy coaches, literacy specialists, instructional leaders, school administrators, district literacy leaders, and professional learning communities.

As you read, you will dive deeper into the topics of

• Responsive Literacy Teaching
• Reading
• Readers' Workshop
• Talking About Reading
• Writing About Reading
• Writing
• Writers' Workshop
• Phonics, Spelling, and Word Study

and find useful tools, strategies, and insight on how to implement them in your classroom.

As you engage with The Literacy Quick Guide, you'll learn:

• Specific ways to support English Language Learners
• How to select texts and create text sets for your classroom
• How to build and organize your classroom library
• What a leveled book is and why a level matters
• The power of inquiry
• Effective practices for Interactive Read-Aloud, Shared Reading, Guided Reading, Independent Reading, Book Clubs, Reading Minilessons, and Readers' Workshop.

The Literacy Quick Guide is your guide to new beginnings, your guide for planning and structuring, your guide for learning about learning, and your guide to a re-envisioned, cohesive literacy classroom.

For more information, check out The Literacy Quick Guide brochure here, a sample chapter here, and dive into Fountas & Pinnell Classroom™ here for a look inside a fully cohesive classroom literacy system.

See p.82 of The Literacy Quick Guide for a complete bibliography.

For more information about the research behind Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell's thinking, see the References page in the back of Guided Reading: Responsive Teaching Across the Grades, 2nd Edition.

~The Fountas & Pinnell Literacy™ Team 

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