Chapter 5 Summary: Conferring with Writers
“The authors’ mention that about 75% of what we do as teachers has to do with what was done to us at the other side of the desk, when we were students” is something I will definitely try to keep in perspective as I continue to “unteach” myself from using too much teacher talk. They noted we instead need to always LISTENING“ and actively reading not only our student written work but their body language as well. When conferring we need to understand our writers and where they are in their writing development, build on their strengths and remember to “Teach the writer” not merely work on improving one piece of work. In primary K-1 conferences we need to encourage adding new details to pictures and then adding more detail words. We need to encourage students to sound out words putting down what they hear and accepting incomplete words and not dwell on making sure they have every sound written. I liked their suggestion to ask students to reread their writing and use asterisks to show what they think they did well and to put a circle in the margin at a place where more work need to be done. I particularly liked their suggestions in the “telling the Story of your Reading” section (pg. 58) as confusion is always a delicate area to address in student’s writing. I also like that it does not tell the writer what to fix, but leaves the writer to decide if and where to reshape it. I also agree with the authors that we must always pick a part of the student’s writing that you can praise and start your conference off with that and that you should be a "mirror" to show students how their writing makes you feel. But, most importantly, I agree that we need to always keep our conferences short.