Joanne Hindley Salch and Marianne Marino

The focus of this reading was conferring with your students about their writings. The author discussed the difficulties most teachers have with going about conferences. The article listed important steps to a successful conference: respond first as a reader, find specific things to praise, keep conferences short, get students involved, tell the student the story of your reading, teach the writer strategies,… The article discussed the importance of the conference being a conversation not a lecture. It is meant to be the mid-ground between uniformly praising students and the harsh criticism of red pen marks. The article broke the conference into two parts. The first is focused on what the student is working on and the second it focused on a discussion on how to make the student a better writer.

In my classroom, our reading and writing work is through a basil program. I would use this hand in hand with that program. I have not seen conferences like this take place in my classroom. But I believe it could be utilized during writing time when students are independently working. This makes a personal connection between the writer and the teacher (the reader). It allows the teacher to understand the writer’s writings, thoughts, plans… better. It also gives the teacher a way to make a more personalized plan, objectives, and assessment for that writer. As a professional, it would be helpful to see more conferences taking place in order to focus in on what works and what does not work well. Personally, As a professional teacher, I need to learn to listen and analyze better what the students wants the reader to get out of the writing, rather than what I want the student to write.

This module allowed me to familiarize my self with different types of assessments to analyze students works. Through this module, my wheels started turning when thinking about how I want to assess my students writing especially during my guided lead teach. One thing I will definitely walk way from for my own instruction is making that connection between reading and writing.