Juli
Kendall's
2004-05
READING/WRITING
WORKSHOP JOURNAL
Entry #20
Conferring: Talking to Kids about Their Writing
We're back to conferring.
Actually,
we never left, but we now have a renewed emphasis on talking to kids about
their writing and helping them become better writers. I wrote about conferring
before. It was during the second year of the Reading Writing Journals,
Week #17, "Feature
Articles: Writing and Reflecting." At that time, I talked about how
we organize our conferring and what we try to keep in mind as we do our
conferences. Here's what I wrote:
To help get us going again, our principal created a new PowerPoint based on Carl Anderson's book, How's It Going? He titled it, "Conferring: The Teacher's Role in the First Part of the Conference" and used it as the basis for several staff development meetings. His ongoing, follow-up plan is to visit classrooms and model how to do writing conferences with students. He wants to be videotaped and then to provide the opportunity for teachers to watch and critique the videotapes of his conferences. He sees this as a way to improve how he confers with students and to encourage others to be videotaped, as well. This idea of videotaping instruction and asking for feedback is not new. The National Board process relies extensively on the videotaping of lessons and a thorough analysis of the assessment, instruction, and next steps by the teacher. Some schools of education have student teachers videotape their own lessons to share with their cohorts. For five of the years I taught middle school, I was videotaped teaching three times each year. After the videotaping, I sat down with a small group of teachers and a university professor to analyze my teaching using an instructional checklist. Years earlier, through a program with the University of Arizona, I videotaped Reading Recovery lessons I taught in Spanish and sent them to far-off Arizona to be evaluated by teacher leaders in Tucson.The first two days of writing are spent choosing a topic, doing research and getting ready to write a first draft. Once the drafting of feature articles begins, I'm busy conferring with the kids. This may be the best part of the unit of study. Having conversations with them about their writing while I listen to their thinking, I always learn so much about what they know and are able to do in their writing. But it needs to be about the writer and not just the writing. Here's what Lucy Calkins says about conferences in The Art of Teaching Writing:
If we can keep only one thing in mind—and I fail at this half the time—it is that 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." If the piece of writing gets better but the writer has learned nothing that will help him or her another day on another piece, then the conference was a waste of everyone's time. It may even have done more harm than good, for such conferences teach students not to trust their own reactions. (p. 228)
Will videotaping
ourselves as we confer with students help us become better at helping
our writers rather than helping the writing? Based on my personal experience,
it will make us more aware of what we are doing, the impact it has on
the students, and how we might improve. And while we may not enjoy watching
ourselves on videotape, it will make our conferring better!
Resources page for our Reading/Writing Project
