Blending Methods Part 1: Conferring with Student Writers Workshop

As I thought about what types of practices would be most meaningful for my preservice teachers to explore through authentic engagement at their practicum sites, conferring with student writers was at the top of my list. 

Traditional Course Activity
In previous courses, we would model the process of conferring with writers by using writing samples from students. This helped us to practice the skill of identifying higher order needs and asking guiding questions to elicit reflection on the part of writers. We were able to develop potential strategies and address challenges that arose in the process. However, this experience was always limited because it was missing the most important ingredient--actual students! ​

Reimagined for a Blended Course
For this workshop, I taught the lesson described above in a face-to-face setting to provide rehearsals for applying the practice. Then, I designed a workshop experience that took conferring to their classrooms for authentic practice and reflection. Important considerations given our structural constraints included:

• preservice teachers needed to be able to complete the workshop at a variety of grade levels, for a variety of genres, and under a variety of circumstances
• preservice teachers needed to be able to engage in this experience within the flow of their cooperating teacher's instruction

For some students, it was easy to complete the workshop because writing conferences were already routinely in place within their classrooms. For other students, a little more creativity was required to actually observe students writing. In those cases, conferences were often limited to opening journal entries as opposed to longer or more focused pieces of writing. However, this still demonstrated the power of building relationships through talking about writing, and students were able to learn about their students as writers and individuals. 

Takeaways
As a result of this experience, my preservice teachers developed much more nuanced understandings of their students and the writing process. This also generated many authentic questions we continued to explore in the following weeks. As an instructor, I LOVED reading the notes and reflections my students submitted. In the end, I can't decide what was more powerful: how much they learned about students as a result of these brief writing chats or how much confidence they developed to enact these moves in the future. Most important, perhaps, this allowed all of my students to 'see' writing conferences in action and understand their potential for content areas outside of ELA. 
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Resources

• Link to traditional methods of teaching conferring
• See Workshop handout below