With the volume of students most middle school writing teachers serve, how is one to plan for differentiation? Using a basketball analogy, here is one play you can run...
Category: conferring
How To Name An Explicit Teaching Point for Writers
A clear teaching point helps students understand the work, and makes your conference more memorable. A concisely stated teaching point is also is a tool for keeping your conference focused and effective.
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A Few Reasons to Stop Writing on Student Work
Even if you were somebody who enjoyed your teachers' written comments or corrections on your papers, there are some solid reasons to consider not writing on your students' work.
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Three Ways To Make Your Conferring More Effective
I've been trying to improve my own skills as I sit down next to writers throughout my years of teaching writing, and there is so much more to conferring than the three ideas that I'm sharing in this post.
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Conferring Notes: The Key to Unit Planning
Crafting a system for conferring notes can be a catch-all of sorts, a strategy for ensuring that teammates engage in the highest leverage instructional conversations before the unit begins—even if they haven’t had extended time to unit plan together.
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Positive Feedback That Moves Writers
Specific feedback helps students replicate what you want them to do in their writing.
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Questions to Reflect, Expand, and Select
If we are not intentional, we can easily rush into many teaching points, instead of only one. We can overwhelm ourselves and our students. If we are not careful, we can miss the most important reason we sit with a student―the opportunity to listen and learn.
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How to Name a Transferable Teaching Point in a Writing Conference
Conferring with young writers is far too complex to boiled down to just one important aspect. But... if you had to name the most important part of a writing conference, what would it be?
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Trust the Kids
Finding ways to trust kids, it might be said, creates more space for learning. In this post, I offer a few ways trust can be manifested in a writing workshop...
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Acknowledging Writers to Disturb the Universe
In writing workshop, we operate on multiple levels-- we try to plan and deliver effective minilessons, we try to confer with our writers (and take some notes?), we create anchor charts, and so forth. But what about validating the voices of our student writers? Here are a few tips for disturbing the universe...
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Be a Writing Coach.
Would you like to help your striving writers so they can be more independent? Try a coaching conference to move them forward!
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Writing Conferences: What to Do When a Writer Doesn’t Say Much?
When conferring with a writer, our big aim is to engage in a meaningful conversation with the student about his or her writing. An individual writing conference is likely the single most effective way for a teacher to help move a writer forward. But many times, even with our best intentions and attempts at "training" students how to converse during a conference, the student will sometimes say something curt, like, "Good." Or, "It's fine." Silence. That's it. That's all they have to say. What to do? Fear not! Conferring Carl suggests six strategies to help teachers address this situation...
