Literacy Week 8

In Chapter 9 of Writing Essentials Routeman discusses conferencing with students in both the group and individual setting. Today in my dyad placement I had the opportunity to conference with a few students. The students are working on a genre fiction piece, and for the last few weeks they have been planning their scenes, and began drafting today. During two periods, I had the chance to sit down casually with a few of the students and work on their drafting. I started out the conference by telling the student that I would read their draft back to them and ask them if sentences made sense and the idea of the story was clear to them as the reader. I also asked the students to listen in on the setting of their story and think about where they could add or delete words to make the story make more sense. I then read the story to them, and had them chime in on sentences that were written wrong, or did not make sense. When they were having a time struggling I would ask them questions hoping that they would come to the conclusion that I was thinking in my head without just saying "why don't you write this instead of this..". I wanted them to be able to see how a good writer thinks.

Some of these conferences worked really well, and used a few of the helpful responses that Routeman gave on page 230 - 231. One conference in particular did not go as well as I had hoped, I have a girl in my class who is very set in her ways and thinks that her writing is amazing, she has told me before that she has a specific "style" of writing and is unwilling to change anything. Now I am not saying that her writing is not amazing, but she is in 8th grade, she has a difficult time with punctuation, spelling, organization and making her thoughts and ideas clear to the reader. I sat down with her today and told her I was going to read her first draft of scene 1 to her and see if there was anything we could add, and if the sentences made sense. I was hoping that by reading the story out loud and asking some thoughtful questions to her as a reader she would be able to see what parts of her story she needed to work on or things in her story she needed to clarify. Instead she got defensive when I misread her poorly misspelled words, or when the grammar of her story was wrong, even though she had written it that way! She also got upset when I asked her questions about her story to clarify things such as who was running up the hill, and who was giving Lola her lunch. I tried telling her that I know she is protective of her writing, and doesn't really want to change things, and went on to say that even though parts of her story make sense to her because she is the writer that some things don't make sense to me as the reader. Routeman also states that when conferencing it is good to start off with a positive remark, give some criticism, and then end with something that they can work on. I tried really hard to make sure that I began with a positive thing about her story, and showered her with positive feedback since she was so defensive about the suggestions I made or questions I had asked her for clarification. It ended up being a good conference, and was definitely a learning experience for me. I really enjoyed getting the chance to conference with a few of the students and I found it to be a positive and helpful experience for both the student and myself. Routeman offers some great tips and suggestions for how to have a successful conference and these were helpful as I was conferencing with the students.