Monday, April 28, 2014

Conferring With Writers During The Writing Workshop

When you confer with a student, it isn’t your job to fix or edit the student’s writing. Rather, it’s to teach the student one writing strategy or technique he can use in a current piece of writing and continue to use in future writing. As you confer, keep in mind Lucy Calkins’ wise advice: 
“[We] are teaching the writer and not the writing. Our decisions must be guided by ‘what might help this writer’ rather than ‘what might help this writing’” (1994).


Tips for Conferring with Writers During the Writing Workshop
  • It works well to move among the children, conferring with them at their work places, dotting around the room with our presence.
  • Conferring with 5-6 children a day allows us to work with at least one child from every section of the room.
  • We can make our presence matter more if, when talking with one child, we encourage nearby children to listen in. However, we deliberately ignore these listeners, looking intently into the face of the one child.
  • We teach children that when we confer, we don’t expect other children to interrupt the conference. Another child can come close and listen in, but he/she must wait until we have finished conferring to ask a question.
  • Limit the length of each conference to 5 minutes.
  • Pull together a small group of writers who might benefit from the same sort of help.Small group strategy lessons lasts for 10 minutes.
  • Remember that strategy lessons should not always take the place of individual conferences. All writers benefit from one-on-one attention. 
  • Marking your conference notes with an “SL” beside those that have had a strategy lesson that week can help assure that those children get a one-to-one conference the next week.


Create a Conferring Toolkit
Create a tub or binder that can travel with you from student to student to help you SHOW and not tell during conferences.

Some of the items you could include in your toolkit:
  • List of possible topics; seed ideas; heart map template
  • Mentor text marked with sticky notes labeling teaching points
  • Student writing examples
  • Charts or tools that students will need to use throughout the unit
  • Writing folder with demonstration pieces (high, medium, low)
  • Conferring cheat sheets

Personally, I have a toolkit that I carry around with this little caddy.  In this caddy I have little notebooks labeled with my students numbers.  I take a majority of my conferring notes in these.  They are easy to pull out and rotate 5 a day into one part of the basket, to remind myself the students I MUST meet with.  These are extremely easy for both Writers and Readers Workshop.  I love pulling these out at the end of the unit and celebrating with each student.  They are also extremely easy to use at parent teacher conferences to show parents progress and remind yourself of conversations you may have had.  

Here are some Conferring Freebies to get you started! Click Here to Download!










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