Conferencing, Sharing, and Assessment/Evaluation...

            Conferencing in a writer’s workshop is extremely important, as I have read in our book as well as witnessed in my placement classroom. Having that one-on-one time with a student is a great way to give individual assistance to students as well as showing the students that you care about what they are doing and how they are progressing through their writing. In my placement classroom, my teacher has individual conferences with students. This seems to be very effective because the teacher is able to provide instruction to this one child, and the child may be at a different level than other children. Conferencing has grown in importance to me throughout this semester and while reading this book because I never really understood conferencing. Now I realize that there are 4 components (research, decide, teach, and record) and each component is as important as the next. As stated in the chapter, it is important for the student to do most of the talking because we want to know about his writing and his progress. The way to get the student to talk is to ask open-ended questions, which sometimes may be difficult to do. Keeping the conference to two to seven minutes was a shock to me because I thought that students needed more conferencing time. With this short time, the student and teacher get to the point, and the teacher is able to provide short instruction to help the student at the point I the writing that he is in.

Having students talk during share time is a very essential part of writer’s workshop. I have seen talking in my writer’s workshop go over very well, and I believe that this comes from practice from the students and many examples from the teacher. I believe that sharing is hard for some students to do, but talking through their work is a great way to get better and gain more confidence. The different methods that are mentioned in the book (simple response share, survey share, focused share, and student as teacher share) seem to work very well for writer’s workshop. The main method that I have witnessed is the survey share where students are to pick out certain words or examples from their work that fits in with the prompt the teacher has given. For example, my placement classroom has been working on nouns and verbs, so during share time, the students pick out nouns and verbs to tell to the class.

Asking questions is a very essential portion of writer’s workshop. As stated, questions usually fit in the best with conferencing because the teacher is able to ask questions that are directed to a particular student and that is relevant to a particular student. I believe that questioning and evaluating student’s work is a very imperative part of writer’s workshop. Student evaluations can be very effective too because the students are able to step back and look at their work and where they put in the most effort to see what they enjoyed the most. Self-evaluation can be tricky, but with a little structure and honesty, I believe that students can gain a lot from it.