Developing Conferences in a Secondary ELA Workshop

Now that I have a working workshop model in my freshman and sophomore English classes, I need to begin re-focusing my conferencing methods to better generate conversations.

MY ORIGINAL APPROACH

Currently, I hold what I’ve been considering mini-workshops and leaving feedback on each student’s daily Work Log Google Doc (see screenshots and more details from my January 28th blog post). I’ll ask if anyone has questions once we begin our workshop portion of the class, check in with those students first, and then make my way through the room, beginning with students I have not touched base with in a while.

My approach to scoring also has led me to reconsider how I have been holding my mini-conferences.

SCORING PROCEDURES

I have generally been using a 5-tiered holistic rubric for scoring (modeled after our State rubric for constructed responses), as that also gets me a bit closer to the four-point standards-based assessment rubric I’d like to eventually shift to in my explorations in English education. When grading, I only mark the student’s proficiency level (dropping the rubric into their Google Doc). I decided not to leave written feedback.

However, as I try to touch base with nearly all students during the two or three class days they have for a given assessment (and we’ve been overlapping assignments), I have been honing in on concepts (analyzing characters, setting, etc.), focus (crafting strong claims), and style (giving small mini-grammar lessons, where I am beginning to direct students to GrammarFlip.com for additional practice or individual exploration). My goal here is to have conversations on writing immediately rather than leave written feedback on assessments.

Students are encouraged to revise assessments to prove their competency and growth. I have told them they should see me first so we can discuss why they scored as they did on the rubric. Once we chat, I will summarize our conversation on their daily Work Log for their reference, and they can revise and resubmit for a new score (rather than me being a copy-editor). Not as many students took me up on this encouragement last week from their first scored assessment.

This weekend, I scored two more writing assessments from the past week for my Honors English 9 class. I now think I can reframe my conferencing.

CONFERENCES, REVISED

Now that my students have at least three scored pieces of writing (and my Academic English 10 classes have two), I think I need to reframe my mini-conferences.

·         When I meet with students, I can now also ask them to open their previous work (especially if they scored less than an A). These specific pieces of writing will give us concrete pieces to work with (as opposed to only the in-process work).
·         We can then discuss claims, evidence, style, and other choices.
·         This will give me personal time to further encourage revisions so students can review their previous work after our conversations. Too many students are being satisfied with a C or B.

With more scored writing samples, we will always have something to discuss. My original challenge, I realized, was that I was touching base (and definitely clarifying misconceptions and helping establish focus in student writing), but now that students can see where their analyses fall in my assessment process, we can pinpoint places to work on.


FUTURE CONFERENCE GOALS

I have the following goals as I move forward. They may not happen this year, but are on my radar to implement as soon as I can.

·         Audio-record my thoughts on student writing as I score in Google Docs. Typing does take time, but I am wondering if a quick audio recording and get notes down faster.
·         Video-record my conferences with students that we can then upload to their daily work logs as a record of our conversations. I am content to type summaries of our conversations (despite it slowing me down just a bit from working with the next student).
o   I think, too, it may be great to record the conversations but then task the student with typing the salient points. This, of course, will take training, but self-identifying the most important points from a conversation is a beneficial skill.


Implementing workshops has not been an easy endeavor, but I feel like my students are more fully engaged every day in reading, writing, and thinking. I plan to survey them shortly on the perceived effectiveness of our process, and I will be sure to share the results here.

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