Conferring - Liz

Bottom Line - I need to do more conferring! I genuinely feel that my practices with this change every year. I used to focus much more on conferring during my first couple of years of teaching. It really was the best way for me to listen to my students read, talk about their books, and connect with them one-on-one.  Even though I was meeting with my students regularly on an individual basis, and trying to track our conversations with a template I created, there wasn't as much substance to the conferences as I wanted there to be, but I wasn't sure how to get there.

As the years went on, and we had some PD/PLCs around small group work, I shifted my focus. I hadn't been doing any small group meetings during reading or writing workshop time, so I really put a lot of effort into trying to make that work. I observed other teachers, read a lot on the topic, and tried a number of different organizational strategies to get small groups to work. I feel as if I've been successful with skill-based small groups. For example, if I've noticed that a group of students need work with identifying author's craft in their reading, I'll pull them and do some focused work on those skills. Same with writing.

After the work we've done with the Units of Study, I am excited about working toward more focused conferences this year. I appreciate the outline given for the different steps of a conference, as well as the various formats for recording notes from conferring. While I've only just started to re-vamp my plans around conferences, I have been able to get 3 conferences done in a workshop period, and I'm working toward conferring with 4-5 students each class period eventually.