(from MM 826 - March 2, 2020)
Ideas
for Individual Student Reading Conferences
“My favorite moments with my
students happen one-on-one,” says Arkansas teacher Justin Minkel on this
article in Education Week Teacher. To
make the most of reading conferences, he suggests the following:
• Prioritize quality over quantity. Trying to rush through the entire
class each week is a mistake, says Minkel. His routine is doing two or three
conferences a day, so some students are seen every other week.
• Read with struggling readers more often. “Being equitable with our
time doesn’t mean allotting it identically to each student,” he says. Minkel’s
emergent readers have conferences almost every day.
• Begin with a compliment. Reading aloud is a “vulnerable process for
many children,” he says. “They tend to be more receptive to feedback on their
reading abilities if we begin that feedback with one or two of their
strengths.”
• Have the student try out a new skill on the spot. “Sometimes, even
when they’re eagerly nodding their heads, our students have no idea how to go
off and do what we just told them to do,” he says. “It’s not enough to teach.
We have to make sure the kids learn.”
• Check for comprehension. Some students can read with 100 percent
accuracy but not understand what they just read. Simple, low-key questions – What happened in this story? What did you
learn from this book? – tell whether the student is doing the “critical,
invisible work of reading – visualizing, connecting, inferring, predicting,”
says Minkel. This is especially important for English learners, and for all
students it builds the bridge from thinking to talking and then to writing.
• Immediately put observations to work. Reading conferences give
teachers invaluable information about each student’s fluency, comprehension,
and strategies for figuring out tricky words, and it’s a shame if the data wind
up in a manila folder and aren’t used. Minkel believes in applying insights on
the spot – grabbing a whiteboard and helping a student see how to turn the word
moon into main and mean, or asking,
What happened so far? “The time we
spend gathering data is only useful if we actually use the data to make kids
better readers,” he says.
• Teach the reader, not just the reading. Minkel suggests using
one-on-one time with students to check in with them on the bigger picture: How’s our class going for you? Any problems?
How’s your baby sister doing? “Taking that half-minute to ask how students
are doing can convey that we care about them as human beings, not just as a
collection of reading levels and test scores,” he says. “Over time, these
little human moments can strengthen, reinforce, or repair the relationship at
the heart of teaching.”
“Six Tips for Making
the Most of One-on-One Reading Conferences” by Justin Minkel in Education Week Teacher, February 25,
2020, https://bit.ly/2PCU2FO
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