How's It Going? My 1st Conferences with Young Writers

This week I am so excited to announce....I gave my very first whole-group lesson- a writing lesson at that! I know to many seasoned teachers this sounds silly- I know you do this everyday, all day long.  Just try to remember back to the day you did your first- nerves, excitement, and fear that you wouldn't get in all that you wanted to teach.  Will the students understand my expectations? Will they be motivated and excited to initiate learning?

For my wonderful group of 6th graders, I decided on a persuasive writing lesson.  I started by reviewing the basics, which they were pretty familiar with.  From here, I introduced their first choice.  A persuasive letter or persuasive essay was their first choice. We started a discussion in class to iron out the differences between both.  We talked about "our readers"- which format would reach your desired audience best? Why would you choose one over the other?  Does your format depend on your topic? What were the expectations for the letter, for the essay?   These were some of the questions they explored during our class discussion. From there, I provided the students a graphic organizer to help them get their topic, thesis, audience, and evidence in order.  I explained my expectations and provided them a rubric to guide their work.  Then...I STEPPED BACK and let them WORK! This was hard! The whole first work day, I wanted to jump in and pester them about their work.  Circulating did prove to be helpful to some students as they were developing and brainstorming for a topic of their choice, but for some they just wanted to be on their own.

The rest of the week they were given work time during our Daily 5 rotations.  This gave me the opportunity to move around the room and conference with different students each day. Wow is all I can say.... After watching and reading endless conferencing videos and articles in my college teaching classes, I was finally doing it on my own.  I was using a system that was kind of a hybrid.  I was using a conferencing form from Carl Anderson's book I have mentioned many times before, Assessing Writers.  Below is a picture of my conference forms.  I copied them on a different colored paper so they would be easy to find in a pile of papers or among other assessment forms on my clipboard.  The different colored paper worked very well for me because I was able to grab a new conference sheet quickly when moving from student to student.

I decided on an organizational system similar to those I had seen in many videos. I am so proud my system worked so well for me.

As I sat on my living room floor, that first night, I spread out all my papers and looked back at my scribbled notes and the checklist I had created. I knew more about my students tonight, than I had that morning. The feeling was one of satisfaction and excitement- my conferences had worked!

 I seriously can't believe the amount of information I learned about each of my students from a single writing conference.  Through conversation, I learned that K has great knowledge of persuasive language but could benefit from a lesson on writing conclusions.  I learned A has incredible skills when it comes to organization but could benefit from a lesson on diversifying transition words.  I learned O tends to think longer about her writing before starting but when she does she has an incredibly witty voice.  I learned M finds a graphic organizer helpful before he writes, while H likes to write a draft before going back to reorder his thoughts. This invaluable information would have been lost to the universe had I just assigned them the work and scored the results.

"With all the pressure we feel today as teachers to raise test scores and get students to meet standards, it's all too easy to forget to communicate how much we care about them as people and as writers.  It's easy to see only the work and not the young writers who are doing it" (Anderson 172).  This quote guided me as I began my first writing conferences.  Through personal conversations about writing, I learned so much about my students strengths and struggles.  While all this information is important to guide my future instruction, it was the conversation- the little, quiet one-on-one moment in an otherwise busy, noisy day that made the conference so special to me.  I loved being able to attend to just one student and give them my undivided attention.  I hope this was as special for them as it was for me.  "By truly listening as we confer with children about their writing, we let them know that the work they're doing matters" (Anderson, 173).  To me, this is one of the most important messages to convey to our students if we want them to initiate writing.  After this experience, there is no doubt in my mind, I will be using conversations like this in my future classroom.