School Talk: Conferring in the Writing Workshop by Marianne Marino and Hindley Salch (Katie Gleason)

This issue of School Talk is all about conferring with students on their writing which means simply conferencing with them with them one on one to have a conversation about their writing. It is said to start a conference with simple questions to get a conversation going as well as setting up assessment ideas such as “How’s it going?” or “What are you doing as a writer today?” This gives the students a chance to take ownership of their writing by retelling to their teacher. As the teacher talks with the student they assess what that individual student is doing as a writer. There is also a point at the end where the teacher talks with the student about how to be an even better writer. They are to focus on the student’s writing and teach them specific ways to improve it. I really love the approach that is talked about in this article because it is all about listening to what the student has to say by asking the question such as “How’s it going?” while having an expression of sincerity. This shows the writer that the work they do as a writer really matters!

I would love to use this approach in my kindergarten classroom. My reasoning for this is because it is very hard to assess writing during a whole class activity. I also have a few quiet students in the classroom that will tend to stay away from discussion as a whole class, but if we sit down and talk with them separately they tend to talk much more. I really like how much it shows the students that we care about each of them, and what they are learning. As a professional I need to become comfortable with assessing students in a conversational on the spot style. I have noticed many teachable moments that have just showed up that I could have taken to ask questions and assess. I would like to be able to have a conversation with a student about their writing experiences comfortably. This seemed to be an attainable skill with practice and beginning prompting questions.

In my student work that I collected I felt as if I would really like to go back and talk with a few students about why they wrote what they did and what their thought processes were. After reading the School Talk article I feel as if conferring with students is a perfect way to go about this! During my unit students will be doing writing as a few centers, and I would like to incorporate conferring with students after completing centers. From student work I would like to plan a conference with students where we would be able to chat about if they enjoyed their writing and why they wrote what they did. I would also use this time to talk with students on ways to improve their writing.