This afternoon, I participated in writing conferences with students. I observed some conferences with my mentor teacher, she watched me do a few conferences with students, and then she turned me loose to conference with the remaining students. I was nervous at first, but after a few conferences, I figured out my questioning method and what I wanted to help the students with.
One question I had for my mentor teacher was I did not know what to focus on when doing the first conference with a student. If the student has many grammatical and spelling errors, then this takes away from the ideas portion of their narrative writing. But if you focus on the ideas portion, then the student would not get an idea of their grammatical and spelling errors. She informed me that when I participate in writing conferences, that the answer would come to me. She said that she couldn't really answer my question fully because it was a situational question. For the main part, she wanted me to focus on the ideas portion of their narrative because we can always have the students proof their own paper or proof a peer's paper. So with the conferences that I had, we went through and talked about their ideas and the style of their narrative. THEN if there were major spelling and grammatical errors, we would talk about those too.
With the conferences I was putting on, I made sure to ask the students what they liked about their writing. I thought this question would help me see what they believe their strengths were and would give me an insight as to how they think of themselves as writers. It was really interesting to hear the students' responses! Many of the students said that they thought they were good with writing entertaining, funny stories while others said they thought they did good on the style and sentence structuring of their writing.
It is really encouraging to see how far these students have come with their writing. The first week of school, we took a writing sample, and just comparing the two, it is really neat :) The students have learned so much throughout this semester so far, and I can only imagine what they will be able to accomplish by the end of this year.
Today one student told me that it was almost November, which meant it was almost my last day. That just broke my heart. These students have made such an impression on my life and have shown me that I have definitely made the right decision in my becoming a teacher. I will never forget these students and wish time wasn't passing so quickly!!
You can imagine how happy it makes me to read this. I also felt good about reading your mentor teacher's answer to the question about how to conference - it is something I never really have a good answer for. You are smart to see that just getting the student to talk about their writing is an important and beneficial process. I also like the importance of ideas, of course. So excited to hear that you have seen progress! And no doubt, you've been a huge part of what these students have learned. Saying goodbye is by far the hardest part, but there is joy in wishing them well and knowing they are on to other things.
ReplyDelete