With this being my first year teaching the workshop model, I am still learning how to confer. I have really only been getting around to 2 a day, because I tend to confer with my students for a while! Time seems to slip away when we're working, so that is one of my goals. I need to make my conferences effective, but also concise. In terms of keeping track of what I confer about with my students, I am using pencil and paper with a class list, as of right now. I am planning to try out the different forms we received, but also give one of my co-worker's digital conferring programs a try. It will be nice to have our notes of conferences in a easy access, portable system.
As of right now, I am proud of the content of my conferences and how I have been using the guidelines we have learned about in the Guide book. Asking students, "What have you been working on?", listening to them read, providing a compliment, and then a goal, has been really beneficial and gives me a better sense of how my students are developing as readers.
For now, my goals are to cut down my conferring time to 5-10 minutes, see about 4 students a day, and find a more effective way to store and manage my conferring notes.
Holly,
ReplyDeleteI connected a great deal with your comment about the time it takes to confer with each student. I find myself, like you said, spending a great deal of time with an individual. A goal that I have is to work to use the model that we discussed last week in class in order to shorten these. This is also something I struggled with while conferring about writing using the units.
Holly,
ReplyDeleteI really related to your comment about tending to confer with students for too long. These questions, compliment, modeling and setting goals takes some time. I would love to hear from others how they fit in more than a couple during readers workshop.