With classroom-tested tips from our Curricular Resources authors on how to improve your teaching at any grade level, each Writing Masters installment will share author insights and practical suggestions on teaching writing in the classroom that you can use the very next day. This week in the Writing Master series, Carl Anderson describes the conversational moves he uses in student conferences.
"When I’m conferring with a student, I love hearing what she has to say about her writing. What she tells me, then, helps me realize the promise of the conference—that I can tailor my teaching to her individual needs as a writer, wherever she is in the process of writing." —Carl Anderson
by Carl Anderson
One of the questions that teachers ask me about conferring is how I know what to teach students in each of the different stages of the writing process. My answer is a simple one: ask students about what they’re doing as writers.
In my book, How’s It Going? A Practical Guide to Conferring with Student Writers, I make the point that a writing conference is a conversation between a teacher and student. The word conversation, of course, suggests that not only the teacher, but the student also makes an important oral contribution to a conference.
When I’m conferring with a student, I love hearing what she has to say about her writing. What she tells me—where she is in the writing process, what she’s trying to do as a writer, what she’s trying out that has been taught in mini-lessons, the problems she is wrestling with—gives me information that I need to make a good, accurate decision about what to teach her in the conference. What she tells me, then, helps me realize the promise of the conference—that I can tailor my teaching to her individual needs as a writer, wherever she is in the process of writing.
Since writing conferences are a type of academic conversation, many students haven’t learned how to have them outside of school. Thus they need us to help them learn how to play an active role in conferences. When I’m conferring with students, here are some of the conversational moves that I use to support their talk:
You can watch me demonstrate these conversational moves, and support student talk, on the DVD, “Carl on Camera,” part of my Heinemann curricular resource, Strategic Writing Conferences. I would suggest starting with Conference 5 in the “Topics” menu, “Finding a Topic by Mining a Writing Territory;” Conference 24 in the “Drafts” menu, “Crafting a Scene by Describing Character Actions,” and Conference 3 in the “Finished Projects” menu, “Revising by Focusing an ‘All-About’ Story.” In these conferences, the students talk fluently and precisely about what they’re doing as writers, with some support from me. This helps me make just the right teaching decisions to meet their needs. Click here for samples from the resource.
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Next week, Laura Robb returns to our series with tips on how to focus and prepare your conferencing.
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