ASSIGNMENT SEVEN: Student Writing Conference - Choose one or two children (classroom students, relatives, neighbors...) to conduct an informal conference with. You may choose to use one of Regie’s formats, your own or the one below, which I use in a conferring notebook. You need to find a system that will work for you. Example 1 (and below) is the format I use for each writing conference that I hold with students. Keep in mind that while you are conferring with students, the majority of other students should be writing!
(Note: If you aren’t currently teaching please find a school-age child to do a conference with. We believe you will find it is worth the effort.)
Student Name: Date:
? (Question- Teacher asks)- “What are you
working on today in your writing?”
C (Compliment)- Compliment the student on one
strategy they are using well.
TP (Teaching Point)- What is one
strategy/point/goal you can teach this student to
move them forward?
FNT (For Next Time)- What needs to be a focus
during the next conference/what were set goals?
ASSIGNMENT SEVEN: After completing your one or two conferences, please reflect on how well they went and how they will impact your whole group, small group and independent instruction in your classroom. Post your reflective response to the blog.
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Writing conferences:
ReplyDeleteThis assignment pushed me to do the rough work of engaging a pre-kinder into changing their work. At this age and stage, it really is all about the process. While in the older grades it is usually about the product. Nonetheless, I chose a student who attends our school part time and is also currently a Kindergartener. He is familiar with conferencing and editing work. I also used a whole-class sharing as a conference strategy as well.
While I was grateful for the given format and will use the format at a later date, for these particular conferences the verbiage did not fit the situation so I adapted my own conferencing strategy.
The writing work that this class is currently working on is poetry, albeit, very simple poetry, the conference results truly surprised me. Most of the students quickly identified a word or two that they could change to make the piece “better” (their vocabulary choice); the revised poetry work was impressive. Per usual, we talked extensively about what “better” meant to them. What I took away from this assignment was the personal connection work with young writers, as I mentioned earlier, in the early childhood setting it is all about the process not the product. It was moving for me to watch them employ great effort to apply the concept of revision.
I conference with writing students daily, the challenge I face is record keeping, and keeping track of with whom I have met each day. Much of my time is often taken by those students who seek me out. I would like to have a better routine in place that will insure I am able to meet individually with EVERY student each week. I used the conference format this week as a starting point. I found that the format made the conference more formal and it forced me, and students, to make written goals (FNT) for their writing. I found this to be positive and since I made the effort to put this format into a notebook, I now have a record of where my students’ writing is and where it is going. I was able to meet with about sixteen students using this format and plan to continue the meetings. The meetings went well and I now have a written resource to make future conferences run faster and more efficient. When we met before, I always had to ask students to remind me what they were working on. Now I can easily refer to my notebook and we have a starting point for our conference. I also found through reflection on my written student notes that quite a few of them are having trouble with dialogue. This fuels my decision to make my next class lesson on dialogue. What a great resource this will be in creating mini-lessons that are truly tailored to each individual class and what they are in need of.
ReplyDeletePenni, that's great! Regie would def. want you to adjust it to make it work for you.
ReplyDeleteTonya, So glad that the assignment helped you to develop a system for record keeping. Yes, using the notes enables teachers to know what to re-teach or what strategy group needs to be pulled. Pretty powerful stuff!
I went into this assignment feeling that I was pretty comfortable doing writing conferences, but quickly discovered that several of the suggestions greatly improved the effectiveness of my conferences. Like Tonya, the record keeping is probably my biggest sticking point. My conferences have tended to be somewhat hit or miss. So I have added a section to the back of my reading conference notebook to keep track of writing conferences.
ReplyDeleteRather than meeting with students at their desks, as I have traditionally done, I met with the students one-on-one on the rug. I was surprised how this made the conference seem more "formal". I was pleased at how independently the rest of the students were working. (some were obviously eves dropping on the conference-- not a bad thing at all!) .
I found it a bit of a challenge not to read over the students shoulder as they read their story to me the first time, but this definitely helped me focus on developing goals beyond basic proof reading. With two students we focused on finding a sentence that could be brought to life with more interesting words. The third student had a story that didn't have a central focus, so we worked on narrowing the topic. She came away with two future stories to write as well. I still am catching myself wanting to do the writing for the student as we make changes, but I see the importance of letting the student hold the pencil during the pencil. As I read the story aloud the second time, all three students found errors that they wanted to correct. Using this format I'm looking forward to trying the public conference next. Using a combination of these two styles of conferences I feel like I can comfortably meet with each student every other week.
Madiha GuezguezMarch 13, 2013 at 1:02 PM
ReplyDeleteSince I don't have my own classroom right now, I conducted an informal conference with my daughter who is in second grade. I already have a clear idea about her writing style and her academic level in general. She always shares with me her writings, but I never tried to confer with her or set goals for her. She shared with me a story she wrote about her dream to have a pet. She wrote about the plan she made to collect money ( do some shores), and her ability by the end to achieve her dream. This story was from her own imagination because it never happened at home. At first, I celebrated her writing and I complimented on her great effort. She was so happy to hear that. Then, I noticed that she is writing a very long paragraphs with all the details inside, that sometimes I lost attention listening to her. After explaining to her my point, we made a goal together for her to do a second draft trying to use interesting words and to focus on the important details instead.
I also tried to copy Regie's way of fixing the spelling mistakes. I was surprised that she knew the misspelled words and she knew how to fix them too through just a little guidance. Raising expectation on our students and on own children is really a great resource to use in order to guide them towards success and accomplishment. I'm glad that the education system has changed because I won't imagine our young children going through the negative and the frustrating learning experience I had to go through.
I have writing conferences with my students every time we have writing. I only have three students in my writing group, so this is doable. They are academically low, and need my help to stay focused in their writing, especially on pieces that are being continued from period to period. We only have writing twice a week, on Mondays and Tuesdays and even those times occasionally get cancelled by room clears or other unforeseen events. So, we begin each period by reviewing what was written the time before and this allows them to continue their train of thought. This particular time I had a conference with boy about a piece structured after a Goosebumps story about a can of goo that had magical properties. He has been working on this piece for quite some time, and I may have mentioned it in a previous assigment. While it was a similar idea to the Goosebumps book, his story involved dinosaurs, so I allowed it to be acceptable as it wasn’t a direct copy of the Goosebumps book. In the past I have written directly on his paper, and kind of “took over” his thoughts. This time, after seeing Regie in action, I was much more respectful I think. I started with things that I loved about his writing, the details, emotion and dialogue. Then I gave him a few suggestions and allowed him to take them if he so chose, rather than just telling him he needed to do it my way. I think this was much more effective in letting him feel excited about his work. I have a tendency to push for perfection, this time I was more aware to push for what I knew he could accomplish at his level. Our next conference will be the final conference on this story and then he will be ready for writing his final draft and sharing it with the class. He is so excited about this particular piece he has asked that I make copies of it for the classroom teacher, for his mom, and for the principal. I just loved that moment!
ReplyDeleteConferencing
ReplyDeleteLexy loves to write and choose to in her free time. I asked her to share a story from her journal she was most proud of. She is a top student in my class.
Q: Story about her neighbors horse
TP: Sentence variety. Many sentences start with “I” or “Starlight”
C: Lots of detail.
FNT: Rearranging sentences so there is a variety. (Whole class lesson to be shared) Ok
Samuel loves journaling. Mostly comic style. LOTS of illustrations. Not a lot of words. I asked him to share a story from his journal he was most proud of. He is an average student in my class.
Q: Comic
TP: More details. There aren’t a lot of words. Mostly illustrations. I wrote on stick notes the things he had to explain to me and had him restate them so that it would make more sense for the reader.
C: Great illustrations. Great lead.
FNT: Show Samuel some more balanced comics that have more writing. Take more about audience.
Kendra is a strong writer with lots of imagination and academically high. She is reading beyond her grade level and has many hobbies. She isn’t in my class or school. She is a 6ht grader.
Q: Prompted topic- Bullying/ took notes on articles and videos.
TP: Audience – “I’m writing it for my teacher and to prepare for a writing test.”
C: Lots of great facts! Strong lead.
FNT: Audience- I want Kendra to me more aware of audience- if she isn’t aware I sure the rest of her class isn’t. I asked her if she has ever been introduced to the work audience when learning about writing and she said no.
Overall I want to focus on Audience. I want to really get kids to think about the reader. I will also play the sentence game. Where student rewrite a sentence I give them in as many ways as they can -a lesson from Step Up to Writing curriculum.
I also like the model that you provided – it made this process quick and informative. Thank you!!
Assignment 7 Conferencing
ReplyDeleteI decided to conference with several of my struggling writers. After having them read me their stories I decided to focus on verbs. I had my students underline every verb in their piece. We talked about shades of meaning, where we made lists of verbs. These lists looked like this: walk (generic) what are other words for walk. Using their schema and a thesaurus we came up with stroll, saunter, hobble, amble, stride etc. We did this for all of the verbs in their writing either together or in pairs. They decided which word would add more interest and meaning to their piece.
Often when we do something like this as a whole group these students don’t understand what I am asking them to do and struggle with revising their work. While we worked together they were excited to make their writing better. While their writing needed more improvement it was a great start to having them look at one aspect and make changes.
We made a goal to look at the verbs in their upcoming writing and revise using the thesaurus and shades of meaning lists and choosing a verb to make their writing richer. They were proud and excited when I praised their success. We talked about what we would do at our next writing conference and they seemed to look forward to it.
I will try tomorrow to make the one or two specific comments about spelling and punctuation. I think this is a great idea because they become so easily overwhelmed and discouraged. I have dropped the ball on these strugglers I must admit because I felt that whatever I tried was either not understood and followed through or misunderstood and done incorrectly. I see improvement already and that is encouraging not only for them but for myself as well. Thank you.
It sounds like everybody was able to pick up a new idea or two to incorporate into their conferring! We're glad the form is helpful to you. Record keeping is often the most difficult part of workshop time.
ReplyDelete