Carol Talanges - Blog # 3 - Conferencing

I choose to focus on my conferencing for this month’s blog. Conferencing with my students is done daily in my classroom and is my favorite part of the day. Conferences may be content driven. Such as, we have a goal of creating summaries from text and after my daily mini-lesson I informally conference with my students about how they are preparing to write a summary for the chapter of the current book they are reading. It is informal and it directly guides my continued lessons for summarization the next day. I also quickly gather who needs remediation and who needs to be challenged as a reader. I also learn what strategy that I have shown then that they are choosing to use for their personal success.

Other conferences are formative, such as, monthly reading log goal conferences. These conferences are a great way for me to assess my student’s monthly progress as independent readers. We look at if they met their reading goal and look at what strengths and weakness they have had with independent reading that month. (genre variety, reading complexity, reading comprehension)We always refer to the previous month’s goal and check on the status of our goal and then brainstorm what the student’s new or continued goals will be. The Reading Goal Log conference informs my instruction as I get an overall view of what my student’s strengths and weaknesses are. I have been focusing my mini-lessons on what students feel that they are weak in and continuing to provide support throughout my reading instruction. For example I saw a pattern of student’s still not being certain about making “Just Right” book choices so I retaught my lesson on choices and now I monitor their choices in the library closely to aid them in making “Just Right” choices for themselves.

I think that reading conferences are a powerful tool for teachers and my students enjoy sharing what they are reading with me and I love to learn about them as readers. I have noticed that some students who were once hesitant to the idea of individual conferencing are now much more confident when talking with me about their reading because it has become our new reading normal. I think that the most important aspect is for student’s self-reflection and immediate teacher feedback because they know how they are doing as a reader and know what they need to work on to become an even better reader.