Laura

I really liked how Anderson helped us wrap up all the content of what it means to confer with students to help them become better writers.

Before the end of the book, I still had a roaming question- How do I get there? How do I teach them about the different writing strategies? what are my mini-lesson going to be on? -knowing that Common Core only talks about three types of writing, but nothing in specific.

Although Anderson could not asked to all of my questions, he did a pretty good job at guiding me towards the right places.

For me Chapter 5 and Chapter 6 were the most knowledge revealing, I learned a lot of things from Chapter 7, but luckily there is already a culture of respect and love in my classroom, and I hope when conferring it does not get too out of control. I will def. review constantly the steps, rules, and guidelines of the classroom when there is conferring time, and will make sure students practice and model the correct behavior constantly, explaining the why of our attitudes.

The most revealing and helpful topic to me, was mini-lessons. I learned that it is extremely important that our decisions about what to teach in mini-lessons are based on our assessment of student’s needs as writers:

According to Lucy Calkins mini-lesson are all about context. In mini-lessons, we teach into our students’ intentions. "Our students are first deeply engaged in their self-sponsored work, and then we bring them together to learn what they need to know in order to do that work. This way they stand a chance of being active meaning-makers, even during this bit of formal instruction."

Students tend to develop their agendas for their writing in response to whole-class teaching- mini-lessons.

Mini-lessons give us opportunities not only to give students information about different kinds of writing work, but to persuade students to adopt our agendas for them as writers as their own, and equip them to try out what we teach in their independent writing.

Mini-lessons are effective when students are inspired to constantly try what they were taught.

Effective mini-lessons have an enormous impact on conferences. We don’t spend our conference time teaching about new kinds of writing work, because we’ve already done that teaching in mini-lessons.

Teachers who give effective mini-lessons plan not only what they are going to teach, but how they are going to teach in a mini-lesson. The way they structure the mini-lesson remains constant.

Suggested structure of mini-lesson: we begin with a connection in which we tell students what we will be teaching them and why, next, we teach students about a kind of writing work or by helping them gather information about that work, after we teach, we let students try what they have learned, finally, we end the mini-lesson by linking the lesson to students’ independent writing.- ask who is using the strategy.

Make sure that at the end of each workshop there is a share portion. This will help students see what writing is really for. As teachers are duty is not only to teach about content, but also to make sure that our students are making those bigger connections to skills and real life applications. Are our students asking themselves why do we write? why is it important? where does this fall in my literacy language development? how does writing empower me to be what I want to be? 

 Chapter 6 made me reflect on those questions that I need to be asking myself to have successful conferences. 

“I see that teachers talking with students about their writing. It seems that conferring takes a lot less planning than teaching a lesson to an entire class.” Pg 155

This quote really resonates with me, I identify completely with this when I get observed. Most of the observes do not seem to understand the value of having a conversation with the students about their writing, and they assess me with negative comments saying that I do not follow the curriculum, nor use data to drive my instruction, and do not follow the curriculum guidelines such as tiering vocabulary, or unpacking the standard.

Just looking at a teacher confer may seem deceptively simple, but it is NOT. It takes a lot of thoughtful choreography before we confer in order for conferences to go well.

I love how Anderson guides us through questions we need to ask ourselves so that we can plan for a smooth process of conferring with each of our students. Some of the questions that I really need to think about are:

-where should we conducte conferences?

- what tools do we need to help us confer?

- what do students need to have with them during their conferences?

- at what point in the writing process should we confer with students?

- who will initiate conferences?

- how much time should we devote to each conference?

These are crucial questions that we need to have answers to. It will not be ok if we make this decisions arbitrarily. This will make us be prepared to help our students in their writing process, to have everything handy and ready, and to know when is the right time to intervene.

A decision as simple as were does the conference take place, is so important that it influences students’ willingness to talk with us, as well as the tone of our conversation with them.

I have been making a conscious effort for position myself as a peer, as a friend. To usually lean down, and be at the same height and posture of my students. Even when I am giving instructions, or simply reprimanding for bad behavior.  I don’t want to impose myself in a commanding way, and I don’t want my students to feel fear out of our interactions.

Anderson explains that conferring is not a conversation between equals, but that students seem more relaxed when we meet them at the place in which they feel most comfortable.

Calling students up to the desk put a damper in the conversation, they seem to freeze the moment they arrive there, given that desks are usually a sign of power and authority as a teacher…although I purposefully removed my desk from my room, specifically to take away anything that would represent me as an authorative and unreachable teacher. I placed myself as reachable to my students. I still have a table I use constantly, and I need to make the effort of going to my students, even though this may seem to take a little bit more time. – same with having a special conferring table.

We need conscious effort to develop a conference voice- sometimes even when my voice is lower, I can see myself getting aggravated with those students that are not paying attention to what they are doing, or simply don’t know how to answer to the questions asked.

Tools that we need as writing teachers:

Record keeping forms – this records helps us keep track of when we conferred with our students, what we talked about, and what we learned about students as writers.

I will definitely have a conference folder in which I have a space for each of my students, notes about our conferences, goals, and progress.

Keeping conferences records is worth the effort, you might get confused about what student you were conferring with and what was the conference about. It is also easy to overlook some students, and to think that you have conferred with them when in reality you have not.

A good form could be having  a weekly/monthly calendar with the name of the child you are conferring with under the specific day of the conference, and then write notes below it. I really like this, because it would help me to  keep track of my conferring schedule and to not overlook any student. 

When students are conferring with us, they also need to have their materials ready: Writing notebooks, their most recent drafts, all previous drafts, any piece of literature they as individuals or the class as a whole is using as a model- tell and practice the expectations of having these out

When to have conferences?

We have conferences at all points in time of their writing: - brainstorming, drafting, revising, and editing.

It is important that we let them know how valuable the time of conferring is for each student, and that they need to honor and respect it by not interrupting it, just like they would not like to be interrupted by other students in the middle of their conference.

It is ok that after students understand what a conference looks like, and how it is highly regarded in the classroom, that they can request conferences depending on their needs, but prior to that they have to have had a peer conference, and have a specific mini-lesson strategy, or a text read in class that they could make reference from.

So it is ok to do both, to initiate conferences, and allow students to initiate conferences as well. But make sure that you have a schedule in which you give equal opportunity to all students to meet with the teacher.

Anderson suggests to confer with about 4 to 5 students in a 30 minute period, This would be conferring with each student every 6 to 8 days, and is more than enough to help develop the student as a writer.  This way our conversations will not be rushed, neither extremely lengthy that there will be no time to see any students in reasonable periods of time.