One-to-one Conferences

1. One-to-one Conferences Becoming an effective reading coach Grades 3 through 5 14.11.12

2. Overview of Reading Workshop Schedule • Minilesson • Teaching Point • Active Involvement • Link • Conferences and Small Groups • Sharing

3. Share your experience with Reading Workshop so far • One thing that is really working for you • One thing that you would like to get better at or know more about • One way that I can support you

4. Brainstorm some skills you use when you read • Expression • Visualization • Underlining • Noticing what we are reading • Decoding • Summarizing • Imagination • Rereading • Making predictions • Making connections • Dream • Relaxing • Keeping track of events • Understanding secondary characters • Empathizing with charcters • Expanding knowledge • Traveling • Synthesising • Improving spelling • Vocab. • Deciding which book to read • Envisioning • Fluency • Using picture cues

5. Thoughts on Conferences • What is your goal as a reading teacher? • We need to spend a fair percentage of our time face to face with kids’ own reading. • If we care about their independent reading, they will care about it. • Conferences are our chance to ask, “How’s it going?” • Our goal today is to feel less empty-handed when they say “Fine.”

6. Thoughts on Conferences • Remember, when we confer, we are not simply helping the readers implement the minilesson. • Conferences are opportunities for new teaching that relate more to the child’s ongoing direction as a reader. • Conferences are differentiated, specific, and efficient teaching • There will be a million possible teaching points.

7. Resources for Conference Teaching Points • Reading notes from previous conferences • What we know about the genre the student is reading • (ex. Who is the main character? What does this character seem to really, really want? Why? What might stand in the character’s way of getting this? Take me to that part.) • Thinking about the band of text difficulty • Reading Logs as evidence of the student’s readerly life • Post-its—Thinking about reading (avoid knee-jerk deficit thinking and make a big fuss about what the student is already doing) • Learning Pathways —advancing skills (What is the skill the student is using and how can this child advance farther along the pathway of that skill? Ex. What might it mean to make a personal connection in a more advanced way?) • Conversations with partners about reading

8. Architecture of a Conference • Research (How’s it going?) • Decide and Compliment • Teach

9. Research

10. Research • When someone researches you (a boss, a doctor, etc.) • How’s it going? • Deep listening—leaning in • Record keeping

11. Research • Students need to understand their own role in a conference • What are you working on as a reader? • Stop students when they launch into a retell of the whole story • “When I ask, ‘What are you working on as a reader?’ I’m wanting to know what new stuff you are trying to do to get to be an even stronger reader.” • Naming what often operates below the conscious level • If student is not able to do name the strategy or skill: “Will you do that work right now as I watch,” and then “So to me it looks like you are the kind of reader who...”

12. Research • Readers benefit from teaching you about their reading work (“How did you?”) • Students articulate reading strategies and become teachers as they contribute to the feeling that the classroom is a community of learners • More likely that these conversations will carry on without you

13. Decide

14. Decide • Conferences seem relaxed, but it is actually the most rigorous time in a teacher’s day • All of the components of lesson planning in a split second • Make a judgement with speed and accuracy • What goal is the learner aiming toward? • What does that goal look like in concrete terms? • Where, on the pathway toward her goal, is she located?

15. Decide • “Instruction is powerful only when it is sufficiently precise and focused to build directly on what students already know and to take them to a new level. While a teacher does and must do many things, the most critical is designing and organizing instruction so that it is focused. Without focus, instruction is inefficient, and students spend too much time completing activities that are too easy and do not involve new learning or on tasks that are too difficult” • Breakthrough by Fullan et al., 2006, p.34

16. Decide • Temptations to avoid • Listen just long enough to know the kind of work that the reader is engaged with and then leap to an instant conclusion about what one will teach • First study and name what a reader is doing and then send the reader off to new territory, in a new direction (build off of the reader’s own intentions rather than redirecting)

17. Compliment

18. Compliment • What is it that the reader has already done (or almost done) that I could compliment? • I can teach as much through finding and recognizing and celebrating good work as by issuing challenges. • Make the compliment transferable (Whenever you read a book remember to do this) • Make the compliment centered on new learning (or what the student has almost done) • Ex. “I am blown away by your decision to mark the important steps that your character made on her journey—the big things that happened, the places she visited. I know you did that so you can look back over the whole journey, sort of retelling in your mind and to others, and that is just so smart—to not just read forward but to stop from time to time to recall the path the book has taken so far.” • Make the compliment personal (Don’t simply say nice job on doing exactly what I told you to do. Find out new words or ways to capture what the student has done)

19. Compliment • “People work harder and grow faster when we are seen and our work is recognized.” Launching the Writing Workshop p. 133

20. Teach

21. Teach • This phase includes a teaching point, active involvement, and a link (and it happens really FAST!). • Try to avoid nudging questions to subtly get the students to do what we are asking of them. • This is a moment for a single, straightforward teaching point such as: • “One thing I want to teach you is that it helps for a reader to not only generate questions, like you are doing, but to also carry those questions with us as we read on. Then as we read, we come up with possible answers to those questions. We sort of think, ‘Could it be...?’ and then we read on to see if that tentative answer works.” • Note: This might be a teaching point for a student who is using the strategy of questioning, but simply writing down questions. This teaching point leads the student farther along on the pathway of this skill of questioning while reading.

22. Teach • After you teach you will tend to do a tiny demonstration. Carry with you the class read aloud or a short stack of books. • Name what you have done in the demonstration that you hope will be transferable to the students • “So try it...” and coach • Conclude conference with the idea of “Today and from now on...” • Record the conference and move to the next child

23. Try It Out • Don’t be too hard on yourself • Try it out and take the time to ask • What went well? • What didn’t go so well? • What do you want to try to work on? • How can you improve the intimacy, responsiveness, and effectiveness of your conferring. • Conferencing gets better with time and practice • Encourage students to show their thinking and grow their ideas on post-its • Read last paragraph in conferencing chapter

24. Example Conferences