CONFERRING
It has been fun to sit down and confer with many of you! Be sure to bring your writing to class as we will be meeting in our triads and this will be your chance to get more feedback on your writing. For this blog I am going to suggest that you again take some time to browse through the DVD and focus on conferring. What do you notice about conferring that is something you could try with your students or your fellow triad members? Blog about what you notice and what you can take from it.
P.J. Alexander
ReplyDeleteConferencing Blog – 2/20/12
I watched 7 of Penny’s student conferences. The first conference didn’t offer me much insight, so I thought that maybe if I watched the “Review with Penny” segment, I’d gain understanding, and I did. As a result, I followed all of the conferences with the “Review” and discovered that, whether the student requested the conference or not, Penny is pretty consistent in her efforts to place the conferencing responsibility on the student.
A few strategies stood out:
1. Know the piece before the conference = save time; get right to it.
2. Modeling allowed students access to methodology of others. Penny uses her own work as well as that of students to help kids when they’re stuck. She said she doesn’t always know how to help if she hasn’t seen the problem before. So, the more writing she does, the more problems she becomes familiar with, the more help she can offer. This is a HUGE reason to keep a writer’s notebook.
3. Tell what you know about the piece and repeat what you believe the student said they needed help with. It allows you to be sure that you understand the piece of writing and also that you and the student are addressing the same issue.
4. Move about. Don’t have students come to you. It keeps students working if you continue to walk around. It also appears that students may flag you down as you pass by – a conferencing opportunity that might be missed otherwise.
I will keep these strategies in my deck of conferencing skills.
I watched a combination of conferences and then her talking through the conferences. I find it interesting why teachers do what they do so I liked that feature of the DVD. Below are some things that I took away from video. Some I felt already comfortably, others I felt but it is nice to reaffirm my beliefs and a few are new.
ReplyDelete1. Do not have conferences at one spot in the room. Go to the student and vary the area of the room you are conferring in to help with other student focus and behavior.
2. The teacher does not need to talk the majority of the time.
3. Conferences can be quick!
4. Have a purpose prior to meeting but be flexible with the agenda.
5. Draw other students into the conference.
6. Build confidence – celebrate!
7. It’s okay for students to eavesdrop – they can learn from what is going on in the conference.
8. Listen to students.
9. Know your writers.
10. Symphony Share of Language – have students share excerpts of their pieces that show great language at the end of a writing session.
I watched all of the conferences that Penny had as well as her talking through the conferences.I came away with many good ideas. I liked how Penny didn't just give quick solutions. Students so often get stuck as do adults. It was nice to see how she responded to all of the students.
ReplyDelete1. Read students writing before the conference, know the piece. Too often in the past I have sat and read the writer's piece when I began the conference.
2. Give feedback, but let the student come up with ideas and solutions.
3. Don't just sit in one place and have students come to you. Walk around the room. Be visible.
4. Make it clear in the beginning that when you are conferencing with a student there are no interruptions. So often students find it hard to wait.
5. Allow students to listen in when you are conferencing. They may come away with a new idea.
6. Turn it into a teachable moment. Maybe a grammar or vocabulary piece that needs reinforcement.
7. Write with students, model your work, allow them to model too.
These are some of Penny's ideas that I feel will be helpful with my students.
I had intended on only watching a few of the conferences, but ended up watching all of them too! I felt like watching more than a couple allowed me to connect with multiple writers in my own classroom. As someone who struggles with the same writing "blocks" that Penny's students do, I felt like she always encouraged her students! Penny's responses and ideas on how to keep writers writing was inspiring to me as a writer and a teacher. Her big ideas really hit home:
ReplyDelete* Let them talk first
*Read their drafts first so you know their work
*Be on the move..it keeps them writing
*Some students just need permission to "keep going"
*I love when she said.."writers with little confidence need a roadmap!"
*Have the students write their question at the top of their writing
*And as Penny quoted Graves.."Unlimited choice is no choice at all!"
organization and making room. conferring is tough tough tough. the grunt work of workshop, the on-the-ground soldier stuff. reading beforehand is critical. i'm never very good on the spot with a new piece which what makes "bopping" around checking in with people so exhausting--though when i'm on or the writer is showing improvement, this can be awesome.
ReplyDeletemanaging the rest if the class during conferring haunts me. i am thrown from concentration so easily. i don't believe that while i am conferring my classroom is falling apart, but i am hyperaware. makes it tough.
love the idea os spontaneous sharing. i had been trying to work that in more and more. when i have 25 minutes of workshop time i feel i can get away with some of that. "hey, guys, check this sentence out and give johnny some help. it sounds...off" that sort of thing.
As I think about conferring, I keep coming back to chapter seven in Kittle’s book. This is my favorite chapter. It really speaks to why it is not effective to put together a binder of canned writing mini lessons to reuse each year. “The single most efficient path toward success as a teacher lies in knowing your students in important ways.” This is where the strongest lessons come from. Yes, we all know we need to cover specific skills. We try to move our students forward with the use of voice and strong word choice, but the best way to do this is to take some cues from what our students need. It does not always work to have a calendar with specific things that each of us must check of weekly. “This teaching of writing work cannot be sequential or logical or magically organized. This work is circles.” Teaching writing is so different than teaching any other subject matter. Perhaps that is why it is a subject that administration continually wants defined or nailed down. Unless one gets into the mess of teaching writing, one does not know this. “You have all the tools you need to plan minilessons in the students before youe. The secret is to be willing to flail around together through the murky mystery of how to get to the hear to story.”
ReplyDeleteThis assignment came at a good time for me as I am starting our research projects after vacation. Some of her points that I would like to keep in mind as I am doing my conferences with students both during the note taking phase and rough draft phase:
ReplyDelete*Don't confer with the same students every day (a quick check in is fine) - also make sure to check in with everyone to track progress
*Let them talk first and go in with a purpose just in case they are not sure what they need help on (especially important in 5th grade)
*Find something to help them with right there and now
* use the class models (Which I find so hard to do with research projects!)
*Be positive
* make notes so that I know where I want to go the next time we meet
* I also liked that students are working with the teacher and I am trying to get students to realize that I am not going to give them the answers, but rather I can guide them and they're still doing the work.
I do not do any direct instruction of writing, but I often help students with projects, papers, book reports, etc. Some of the points that stuck out to me where: be positive, make notes so that the next time will know where we left off, class models, and be positive. “Writers grow with regular response to their work and to the work of other writer”…..yes, totally makes sense. However, I do not see time when this happens. Most of the students I work with need a lot of encouragement and structure. I wish there was time in my day to support those kids more in the classroom
ReplyDeleteI really liked what Denise had written about conferring; it made a lot of sense. The quotes she had listed from Kittle’s book were powerful. “The single most efficient path toward success as a teacher lies in knowing your students in important ways.” “This teaching of writing work cannot be sequential or logical or magically organized. This work is circles.”
Conferring for me has always been a challenge....some of the things I have learned over the years involve keeping good, quick, anecdotal notes, being on the "move" while conferring, and to jot "teaching notes" to myself about themes I pick up on from many kiddos as I move about the room and confer. I noticed that Tina referenced the quote about knowing your students in important ways. I find that my writers are amazed by the little strategies that I will pull into a conference that build on a conference from a previous piece of writing. For example, recently, I was conferencing with a student about his poem. He was shocked when I referred back to a conversation we had had about commas after introductory clauses a month earlier. I do remember the conversation, however, the anecdotal note helped me to pull it out quickly from my sleep-deprived brain. the conversation then went to how one might choose to use a comma in poetry when the structure of the poem is somewhat paragraph-like. (although I am not a fan of poems like that! Lol)
ReplyDeleteRegardless of the type of writing, I love buzzing around the room and being able to plan out my next three days of mini-lessons. Another example comes from recent work my students did with informational text. I noticed that many students were struggling with using formal language when the informational text is related to something they feel passionate about. After conferring with many students and finding similar struggles, I was able to plan a mini-lesson how to "recraft" sentences that will give validity to their content by getting rid of statements involving "you" or "I." We talked about audience and how someone writing informational text needs to be taken seriously, therefore, assertions made need to be done so without referencing yourself. (oh, and assertion was one of our vocab words, too! tying in with the most recent CFA---imagine that?!)
Anyway, there are always too many kids and interruptions and needs to confer the way I would truly like to do so, however, I keep trying, and despite our busy days that fly right by, meeting with writers is something we try to do as often as possible---there's nothin' like it!
I watched several of the conferences and found the ones where Penny was narrating to be most helpful because it allowed us to get into her mind. Some of the points that I came away with include both things that were new and others that reaffirmed my own practices. They include:
ReplyDelete•Pause and really listen to the student’s ideas.
•Repeat what the student said to you to ensure you understood.
•Give specific details to what you liked in their writing and what can be improved upon.
•Provide accountability to make them push themselves harder.
•Celebrate the student and boost their confidence as writers whenever possible.
•Be a writer yourself so you can share your own strategies and what you have learned with your students.
•If possible, give them a mission and then encourage them to pursue it.
•Focus on one part of the piece at a time
•Write in 1st person present tense to write in the moment.