Conferring in the Writing Workshop - Joanne Hindley Salch and Marianne Marino

Conferring in the Writing Workshop

by Joanne Hindley Salch and Marianne Marino

including

The Writing Conference: Breaking the Silence
by Ralph Fletcher, Author/Consultant, Durham, New Hampshire

This article is about conferencing with our students, and the importance it holds in writers’ workshop. It includes guidelines such as respond first as a reader, ways in which to praise, short conferences, student involvement, etc. Another part of the article touches on the roles and responsibilities of teacher, with the focus on listening to our students – their thoughts, values, what they hold important. By showing genuine interest, students are more open to writing and sharing their feelings. To do this, teachers must LISTEN to what their students are saying, what they are writing, and how they are feeling.

I would love to be able to do this with my classroom. As of now, students hand in their work, and we return the work with comments on what was done well, what could be improved. I think adding in confronting would help students make great strides in their work, as they will be able to discuss with the teachers their thought processes. This could take place in a time slot within our writing period, with a few conferences a day, while still being able to conference with every student once a week.

To be able to do this, I will need to grow in my abilities to look at writing pieces with a “writer’s eye”. With doing this hopefully I can be more effective in advising my students in areas of weakness, while finding areas of strength to praise. This feedback will be essential to my student’s growth and development as a writer.

The unit that I am planning is writing, so this module was very helpful for me! Learning about writers workshop, in general, has been very helpful in thinking about my unit plan. This article that I chose to read was especially helpful as I have been planning on conferencing with my students during my unit. Not only did this give great advice on what to talk about during conferencing, but also the important roles teachers AND students play in this process. This is especially important as my students have not been conferencing and will need to learn their roles as well.

Martin, Elementary Text Discussion

I chose to read "Elementary Text Discussions" by Martin (2010) because I thought it reflected what I will be doing in my reading class. The article discussed quite thoroughly (for 32 pages) how important it is to engage students in text discussions even in elementary school settings. The author acknowledged that doing so in classrooms with young students may be a challenge, but it is necessary to their growth as learners, speakers, readers and writers. These discussions can include talking about thoughts, feelings and emotions of a text, a focus on text comprehension or classroom interactions around a common text. In these discussions it is the students responsibilty to talk and teach the text to their peers, highlight the important aspects of the text, and actively help interpreting the text.

Although I am not technically teaching writing this semester, I thought that I can use many of the overall themes the author discussed in this article in my reading classroom. My plan is to encourage as much "table talk" as possible, so that students get used to the idea of sharing their ideas and interpretations of a text. At this point in their classroom, the students rarely work in groups, and if they do, they do so individually but come up with a collective answer. My goal is slowly build the students up into doing group work so that eventually (maybe even next semester) discussion will be easy. I truly believe that a student cannot be a good writer without being a good reader and vice versa because to be able to understand how to write a good text, one must be able to understand a text to begin with. For this reason, I think the article although based mainly on writing practices was applicable to my future lessons.

In order for all my planned discussions to be successful I need to continue practicing my classroom management skills and come up with a technique (probably the same one I will use during math discussion) so that the students have consistent rules and expectations when it comes to their discussions. I hope to continue to learn these techniques that will make the idea of a discussion less daunting.

Clearly, based on the videos and articles, assessing the students in writing (and reading) requires ample methods. A teacher cannot judge a student based on one assignment just like they can't judge based on one discussion.