Effective Teaching Practice- Conferencing in Writing

Had a great session with Kara this morning on effective conferencing in writing. Being a PRT this is something I felt I definitely struggled with in terms of how to run a conference and how to plan for them.

Kirsty mentioned something that really made me think. We should run our writing like how we run our reading- one instructional group with the teacher, the rest of the students on tasks that are different. We would never send our kids off to complete a follow up reading activity without doing the guided reading with the text first, so why would we be working with one group writing and the others doing the same thing without any kind of instruction? The other great thing is that doing this will eliminate those lines of kids waiting to conference with me!
I am now going to rearrange the way I run my writing, as it is just as important as reading and maths!

Before a conference, students need to:

• Read their writing and think about the conference before coming along 
• Be prepared with questions on parts they want to focus on (post its- then keep these in books)
• Be prepared to read aloud a favourite part- the conference doesn't have to be on the whole piece!
• Be prepared to tell how the listener can be helpful (e.g. "I want you to listen for...vocabulary/the correct tense/a variety of sentence starters"

The teacher needs to:

• Listen to the student read their writing aloud
• Move the student forward as a writer- sharing a writing model, setting goals, finding gems in their piece, reinforcing strenghts etc
• Focus briefly on technical details- but these aren't the focus
• Ensure that students learn something they can apply to their writing in the future. 

My Reflection:

Changes I am going to make:

• a designated conference area in the classroom so that students have somewhere to sit and conference either individually or in a group
• a chart for display and in the students' books of what they need to do before the conference and some sentence starters/prompts they could use when conferencing
• stop neglecting poetic writing because we are teaching transactional- include a fun writing activity most days to mix it up
• spend some initial conferences focusing on looking at the matrix so students really understand it

There are so many other things to take on board but these are the changes I will be making now.