I’ve been struggling with some neck pain for a little over a year.  Several weeks ago I finally went to see my doctor about it.  As I was waiting for him to enter my exam room, I was thinking about conferring with our students.  Weird, I know, but follow my line of thinking here.  I heard my doctor in the room next door and knew he would be coming to my room next.  I heard the door close, but it was several minutes before he came into my room.  Why?  You know the answer—he was taking notes about his previous patient.  Conferring notes!

Think about what doctors do when they meet with their patients:

• Research: They ask questions and run diagnostic tests.
• Decide:  Based on their research, they make decisions.
• Treat: They prescribe a course of action—medication, surgery, physical therapy, etc.

Then what do they do?  They follow up by seeing their patients in X number of days/weeks to see how things are progressing.  They do some more researching, deciding, and possibly more treating.

Does this sound familiar to what teachers do during a reading/writing conference?  We:

• Research: Ask our students questions, administer formal and informal diagnostic assessments.
• Decide:  Based on our research, we make decisions about what to compliment and what/how to teach.
• Teach: We teach the reader/writer a strategy through demonstration, explanation, examples, or guided practice.

Now, let’s go back to those conferring notes.  My last post dealt with whether or not conferring notes are necessary.  If you read that post, you know my opinion on the matter.

Let me ask you a few questions. 

• Is it important for your doctor to keep conferring (exam) records?
• Do you appreciate the doctors that remember what you talked about at your last visit? 
• Do you think doctors really remember trivia about your job or family, or did they just take some good notes to jog their memories and develop a relationship with you? 
• Does it annoy you when a doctor doesn’t keep good records or fails to read what s/he wrote last time and keeps asking you the same questions over and over again? 
• Do you feel valued as a patient/person when each visit seems like you are explaining your situation again as if for the first time?

What implication does this have for our classrooms?  What if we thought of our students as our little patients and if each time we met with them we were researching, deciding, and teaching them to be the healthiest readers and writers they can be?

I can’t tell you how many times I have been asked this question.  Teachers who ask this are not questioning the value of conferring itself, just the notetaking that comes during/after the conference.

Typical reasons I hear against notetaking:

• “If I spend time writing notes, I end up conferring with fewer students.”
• “I don’t know which is the right form to use or the right way to do it.”

Even before I was immersed in workshop teaching, I always believed that it was important to keep anecdotal notes on my students.  That doesn’t mean I was good at it, but I did do it.  I am here to tell you that there is not one right form or method, but I do believe that notetaking is a non-negotiable.  Here are a few of my reasons:

• We are in an age of accountability.  If I don’t take notes on the valuable instruction I am providing during one-on-one and small group conferences, I have no record or evidence of that instruction.  When a parent or administrator asks what I am doing for a particular child, I want to be able to whip out my notes with specifics.
• My memory just isn’t that good. I often can’t remember what I had for dinner the day before.  How can I remember the teaching points for 25-30 students as I conduct ongoing conferences with them?  I use my notes not only to keep track of what I did with a child, but also to note ideas for further instruction.  I simply can’t keep all of that in my head.
• At parent-teacher conference time, I love to be able to show parents what their child has been working on.  A grade on a report card means nothing.  It is the evidence that supports that grade that counts.  I will never forget the time that a parent looked me in the eye during a conference and said, “Thank you for taking specific notes on my child.  That means a lot to me.”

So now that you know my stance that conferring notes are non-negotiable, how can we remove some roadblocks?

First, what is the right form to use? There isn’t one.  I have changed mine often.  I have used something as simple as a piece of notebook paper for each student placed behind a tab labeled for that student in my conferring notebook.  When I did this, I either wrote notes directly on the page or wrote them on computer labels that I carried on a clipboard and later placed on the child’s notebook page.

I have also created and adapted from other teachers a variety of forms.  Here are just a few that you are welcome to use or (more likely) adapt to meet your needs:

Reading Conference Sheet (one student/page)
Writing Conference Notes (15 students/page)
Writing Assessment Sheet (includes 2 pages/student–make additional copies of page 2 as needed)
Reading Assessment Sheet (includes 2 pages/student–make additional copies of page 2 as needed)

If you are techno-savvy and have access to an iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad, you may want to keep your notes with the Confer app (see my blogpost This Seals The Deal for more information.

Next, what about the concern that if we take time to keep records, we meet with fewer students?  I say, “So what.”  So what if I confer with five students instead of six today.  I’ve never given myself a conferring quota for the day.  I prefer to shoot for quality, not quantity, and for me, jotting a few notes during/after each conference contributes to the quality of the conference.

I recently posted a blog entry about three reasons I think we should allow students to choose many of their own writing topics: 1) engagement  2) agency 3) independence.  In a subsequent post I wrote about how we can balance student choice with required writing.

Today I would like to share the viewpoints of a couple of student writers.  The first is an excerpt from a letter I received several years ago from a former student.  I had the pleasure of teaching Chelsea as a second-grader and then looping with her to third grade.  A few years later she sent me an e-mail about how things were going for her in middle school.  Here is what she had to say…

Chelsea was a gifted writer.  She was capable of selecting writing topics that mattered to her and motivated her as a second- and third-grader.  Yet, when she was in middle school, she was not trusted to find her own meaningful topics.  And she noticed the difference.  She noticed enough to send me this unsolicited e-mail.

The next writer’s story I would like to share is my daughter’s.  She has loved to make up and “write” stories since she was three years old.  She is now 17.  Over the years she has had writing teachers with a variety of teaching styles and philosophies.  She and I have talked often about the impact that choice has on her writing.  One criteria that she uses to determine how well she likes a teacher is how much choice they give her when choosing topics for projects.

While she is an excellent student and cares about getting good grades, she is more intrinsically motivated to do a good job with her work because she cares about it or is personally invested in it.  And like the little hunter in last week’s post, Lauryn is passionate.  Her greatest passion is for dance.  One of her goals is to try out for the show “So You Think You Can Dance”  when she is 18.  She eats, sleeps, breathes dance.  And when given the choice, she writes and draws dance, too.

During her years of schooling, she has examined dance from every angle.  She has written personal narratives and poems.  She has drawn and painted dance.  When assigned to make a Movie Maker video on the topic of “Power”, she chose “The Power of Dance.”  In her science class last year, she chose to research how a dancer’s body changes food into energy to perform.    In her technology class she created a posted about dance (see below). Each time she worked on one of these projects she was so engaged because the topic was meaningful to her.  She wasn’t writing or creating for a grade.  She was writing for herself and her audience.

When students care about their topics,
they write more and they write better.

Below are just a few samples of Lauryn’s writing and artwork—all on one topic.  I hope they will inspire you to help your students find topics they are passionate about.

Dance-Related Artwork

In a recent post I wrote about the importance of allowing students to choose their writing topics.  Whenever I make that statement, I am always prepared to hear the “Yes, but…” responses.  “Yes, choice seems important, but don’t I have to teach my students how to write for a prompt?”  “Yes, but my students have to be able to pass the state writing assessments, and the state test doesn’t give them a choice.”  “Yes, but what if my students say they don’t have anything to write about?  They just don’t have background experiences, so they can’t think of good topics.” 

I want to make sure there are no misunderstandings here.  Is there ever a time when students need to write to a prompt?  Yes!  Should we teach them how to write for a prompt?  Yes!  I believe it would be educational malpractice if we didn’t.  HOWEVER, this is NOT the only type of writing that should be happening in our classrooms.  I have had many teachers tell me that this is the only type of writing their districts require them to teach all year.

Let me give you one way to think about this.  Writing to a prompt or test-taking writing is one genre of writing.  It is worth spending time on a test-taking unit of study to help prepare students for these tests.  However, this is only one genre for writing.  We need to expose our students to many genres through varied units of study throughout the year.  These units may include personal narrative, personal essay, literary essay, book reviews, memoir, poetry, fictional narrative, editorials, and the list goes on.

The units of study at each grade level may not be negotiable at your school, but the students’ topic choices within those units should be.  Teachers sometimes ask, “What about the child who wants to write about the same topic over and over?”  

What about that child? 

A couple of years ago I heard Patricia Polacco speak at the Michigan Reading Association Annual Conference.  She said we should be encouraging students to linger over topics longer and write multiple pieces on the same topic.  She said that she, herself, really only writes about one thing—family stories.  Think about her picture books.  They all stem from stories of her own life or those of her relatives.

I’ve always had my students keep a list of their writing “territories.”  This was a technique I learned in my early writing workshop days from Nancie Atwell in her book In the Middle.  Hearing Patricia Polacco’s advice made me think more about these territories.  These are the areas in our lives where we are experts.  Territories are not single topics—they contain multiple topics.  We should be encouraging our students to write deep, not wide.

A couple of weeks ago a teacher told me that she has a student who is obsessed with hunting and would want to write about hunting all the time if given the choice.  Perfect!  I love when students are passionate about something.  Along with that passion comes loads of writing topics.  I told this teacher that I wouldn’t care if he only wrote about hunting all year.  Here are some pieces I imagine him writing:

• a personal narrative or memoir about a time he went hunting with his dad (he may have several).  I’m thinking of Owl Moon by Jane Yolen or Crow Call by Lois Lowry as possible mentor texts for this type of writing.
• a safety manual for hunters
• a persuasive essay on gun control
• a personal essay on how hunting is a great father-son bonding experience
• a how-to piece like “how to become a successful bow hunter”

Do you get the picture?  You could help a child who is passionate about hunting find topics in every genre unit of study and keep him engaged all year.  He becomes the class expert on hunting.  Pretty soon, other students decide they want to become the class expert on something, and they begin to find their areas of passion and interest.  It’s contagious!

It sure seems to work for Patricia Polacco.  Want to know what some other professional authors have to say about choosing writing topics?  Here are a few:

“Write what’s in front of your nose.”

—William Carlos Williams

“You’re welcome to write about anything, but the places and spaces where you spend time, that’s where you’ll know the details. That’s how you can take readers anywhere, make them see and feel.”

—Jeff Anderson

        “Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.  I am not urging you to write a novel, by the way — although I would not be sorry if you wrote one, provided you genuinely cared about something.  A petition to the mayor about a pothole in front of your house or a love letter to the girl next door will do.”

—Kurt Vonnegut

I will continue to add to the series of blog posts on the importance of student choice in writing, but today I feel compelled to share on the topic of technology in the classroom.

Recently I have been thinking seriously about purchasing an iPad.  It started about a year ago when a friend showed me her new toy.  With her new iPad she had constant access to her Kindle, her e-mail and Facebook, her to-do lists, and more.  I thought that was pretty neat but just couldn’t justify purchasing a new device when I already had a Smartphone that could do most of what she showed me.  But I still thought it was pretty cool!

This school year, as I have attended many meetings, I have often found myself in the minority (sometimes the ONLY person in the room) of people still taking notes with a good old-fashioned notebook and ballpoint pen.  I must say, that as much as I love technology, I do still love the feel of pen on paper and the overall experience of reading books with pages I can turn.  But, as I looked around, I do admit that I had iPad envy as I watched my colleagues navigate from file to file to add notes, look up resources, etc.  Last week as I participated in a kindergarten teacher lab, I watched the facilitator use her iPad to videotape a one-on-one conference so that she could show it to the whole group during our debrief session.  Again, pretty neat!

Still, I wasn’t sure if I could justify getting a new toy just to keep up with the Joneses.

I have now found my justification!  Last Friday a colleague shared with me an app that is available for the iPad (and iPhone and iPod Touch).  It is called  "Confer – A Notetaking App for Teachers".  It is amazing!  Everything I have always tried to do with my conferring notebook can be done with this app.  Here are just a few:

• keep track of students I have conferred with
• keep records of compliments, teaching points, and future instruction
• group students with similar needs for strategy groups
• use flexible grouping to meet students’ needs
• track reading levels
• sort students for instruction in a variety of ways

I found this video that explains how this app works way better than I can: Confer – A Notetaking App for Teachers Video Demonstration

So that seals the deal!  I am now going to buy myself a new Christmas present just so that I can use this app! (They haven’t come out with a version for my Android phone yet).  I can’t wait to discover all the other ways this tool can help me in the classroom.  I invite any of you who have been using iPadsin your classrooms to share your suggestions!

I recently had a conversation with a group of teachers about whether allowing students to select their own writing topics really matters.  In the words of Lucy Calkins, “Choice matters.  Not a little, but a lot.”  In this case, she was talking about self-selected reading, but I think it applies to writing as well.  Since this question seems to surface often in my professional development work, I thought it was worth exploring a bit in a few blogposts.

For today, I would like to address just three key reasons why I believe choice in student writing does matter.

Engagement

When students find their work meaningful, they are more engaged, motivated learners.  “Intrinsic motivation arises from a desire to learn a topic due to its inherent interests, for self-fulfillment, enjoyment and to achieve a mastery of the subject.”(Karin Kirk)  Try doing a Google search with the phrase “student choice and motivation” and you will find a wealth of research that points to choice as a key motivational factor.  You will also find that motivation is linked to achievement.  When students write about topics they care about, they are more engaged and they simply write more and write better.

Agency

In order to empower our students, we must help them develop a sense of personal agency—the knowledge that they are competent and in control of their own learning. In his book Choice Words Peter Johnston writes that “this desire for agency persists throughout life and is so powerful that when people feel there is no relationship between what they do and what happens, they become depressed and helpless.  Having a sense of agency, then, is fundamental.”  He goes on to say that “children who doubt their competence set low goals and choose easy tasks, and they plan poorly.  In the long run they disengage, decrease effort, generate fewer ideas, and become passive and discouraged.”  I don’t know about you, but that is NOT how I want children leaving my classroom!  “Encouraging students to use their words to change the world is the aspiration of the writing workshop.  When students are given choices in their learning, they will feel in control and motivated.  They will question, reason, and analyze important ideas.  Most important, they will rise up and change the world for the better.” from Day by Day: Refining Writing Workshop Through 180 Days of Reflective Practice  by Ayres and Shubitz

Independence

I’m wondering how students will become independent thinkers and writers in our classrooms if we always choose their writing topics for them.  “Many teachers fear that giving students more choice will lead to their losing control over classroom management. Research tells us that in fact the opposite happens. When students understand their role as agent (the one in charge) over their feeling, thinking, and learning behaviors, they are more likely to take responsibility for their learning. To be autonomous learners, however, students need to have some choice and control. And teachers need to learn how to help students develop the ability to make appropriate choices and take control over their own learning.” American Psychological Association

I could go on with even more reasons for providing choice of writing topics for our students, but I will stop there.  I know that these reasons still leave some unanswered questions like, “What about students who don’t choose to write about anything?” and “What about teaching students to write to a prompt for a writing assessment?”  In the next few days I am going to address these and some other concerns regarding student choice in writing, so stay tuned…

I work with many teachers who have a strong desire to improve their literacy instruction.  They have committed to teaching reading and writing through a workshop approach and have set aside time for their students to spend extended periods of time reading and writing.  But then they get stuck because they don’t have the resources for teaching the minilessons they know they should be teaching.  Many of them are in districts that have no formal program or are using strictly basals or scripted materials that don’t offer much depth or richness.  This leaves them to fend for themselves and either create materials or pull together units of study from a variety of sources.  For many years, that’s what I did.  I have loads of professional books from which to pull ideas. (You can see my personal professional library here). Currently, many of the schools I am working with are using the Calkins Units of Study for Teaching Writing, so we are generally following the sequence of minilessons prescribed in the units with some of our own lessons thrown in. 

But what if your school hasn’t purchased a resource like this?  How do you know which order to teach your minilessons?  I found a free resource that I would like to share with you.  It is the Wachusett Regional School District website. 

If you click on the Elementary Curriculum tab, a flyout menu will appear:

On this menu you will find resources for both reading and writing workshop, including a suggested sequence of lessons and lesson plans for oodles of minilessons.  Continue to follow the flyout menus until you find your grade level and the resource you would like to download.

This site provides a WEALTH of information, especially for teachers who are struggling with the “where to start?” and “what lesson next?” questions.  I’m grateful for all of the hard work this school district put into making this such a valuable resource.  I hope you will find it helpful, too!

It’s a snow day here in Michigan (along with many other parts of the country), so I’m using this opportunity to do some catching up.  One thing I did was register for the spring MRA (Michigan Reading Association) conference which, in my opinion, is such a bargain!  I’m looking forward to hearing some of the country’s leading literacy professionals and children’s book authors next month.  I’m most excited to hear Donalyn Miller the author of my new favorite book The Book Whisperer. Read more about this on my previous blogpost about her.

Another thing I did today was a little web surfing.  I found a site that I haven’t had time to fully explore yet, but just had to share it with you.  It’s called Not For Robots.  Under the title on the homepage is this caption: 

“Writing is hard. People for whom writing is not hard are robots and should go away. Thank you.” 

That alone enticed me to explore the site!  Yesterday I had a conversation with a teacher about how hard writing is for kids and how hard it is to teach writing.  Over the years I have definitely found some strategies that take the mystery out of writing for my students, but it’s still hard work.  Anyone who says otherwise is lying!  The Not for Robots site consists of a series of articles written by a professional writer.  She shares her secrets, insights, techniques, and frustrations with the writing process.  It’s an entertaining, informative, refreshing read about the real journey of a writer.  Lots of wisdom we can share with our young writing protégés in our classrooms. 

That got me thinking about some other great sources we can use to help our students get the inside scoop on the writing process and show them that, yes, writing is hard work, but persistence does pay off.  These are all picture books about the writing process:

A few weeks ago I adopted a 5th grade classroom for writing workshop.  The teacher has graciously agreed to share her class with me and allow me to team teach writing with her so that I can continue to hone my skills, try out new minilessons, and develop a relationship with students over the course of the school year.  On my first day with them I asked them to share with me their attitudes toward writing.  One precocious young man (I’ll call him John) was eager to inform me that he doesn’t dislike writing, he doesn’t hate writing, he LOATHES writing.  There was no reading between the lines that needed to be done there!  On subsequent days during our time together, this boy found a variety of ways to stall or avoid writing altogether.  But this past Monday something interesting happened during the minilesson.  I shared with the students a piece of student writing from one of the Calkins’ Units of Study in which a boy wrote about his grandfather’s funeral.  It is a very touching piece and difficult to read without tearing up.  After sharing this piece, I told them that it really resonated with me and reminded me of the last time I saw my grandma before she died.  I added the topic to my writer’s notebook and told them I will someday write about it.  I asked if any of them connected with it.  The room was silent but several students affirmed that it resonated with them as well.  After the minilesson I sent them off to work, but John stayed behind to ask if he could switch the topic for his narrative.  He had tears in his eyes and said he wanted to write about his uncle’s funeral.  He actually wanted to write.  To be honest, I wasn’t sure if he was just being dramatic and trying to get my attention or if the piece of writing was really affecting him that deeply.  In any event, I sent him off to start his new piece. 

Today (3 days later) I was conferring with students who are at various stages of work on their personal narratives.  I approached John’s desk and noticed that he was working intently.  As he looked up at me, I noticed that his eyes were again filled with tears.  He explained that he was at a really sad part in the story.  I asked if he thought he might ever be willing to share this piece with the class.  He replied honestly that he didn’t know because it was just so hard to talk about.  I said, “You know, that’s the neat thing about writing.  Sometimes you can get feelings out in your writing that you can’t yet put into spoken words.”  I left my teaching point at that, not wanting to ruin this moment with some lesson on writer’s craft or convention.  I asked his teacher if he often gets emotional or cries in class.  She said she has never seem him cry until writing workshop this week.  Only time will tell, but this may be a breakthrough for John who “loathes” writing.  As I reflect on this, I am reminded of how powerful writing workshop can be—not just for improving student writing but also for helping children make sense of their lives.  I am also reminded that it is children we teach, not just curriculum we cover.

Has the following ever happened to you?  You are conferring with a writer in your classroom.  You do your research by asking, "How’s it going?  What are you working on as a writer today?"  You pinpoint a teaching point that you would like to teach this writer.  Then you go blank.  You’re not sure how to teach it off the top of your head.  You know there must be a good mentor text you could use to demonstrate your teaching point, but you can’t put your hands on it at the moment or you don’t even have a title in mind.  So you make some half-hearted attempt to teach or you cop out all together and say, "Good job, keep working, thanks for sharing your writing with me today."  A wonderful teaching opportunity is lost.

I know I have been in this situation plenty of times.  Well, this week I learned about a technique that I can’t wait to try.  A literacy consultant shared this tip which she learned when she studied with Lucy Calkins and the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project in New York City.  It is called a Conferring Toolkit.  The toolkit is housed in an expandable file and contains a variety tools that can be used during the teaching portion of the conference.  Here are some of the items I plan to put in my Conferring Toolkit:

• mentor text picture books that are sticky noted with a variety of writer’s crafts
• my own writer’s notebook
• anchor papers from various genres (narrative, persuasive, poetry, expository, etc.)
• examples of both strong and weak papers (from previous students) that can be used to demonstrate various teaching points
• conferring prompts
• a list of teaching points for each genre of writing
• maybe a small white board and marker
• assessment sheets

The toolkit is portable, so it can be carried from table to table or student to student.  You could make a general toolkit or have a specific one for each unit of study.  In either case, the toolkit provides valuable teaching resources at your fingertips.  I’m excited to organize my toolkit and experiment with it in my upcoming writing conferences.  I’m thinking it will help me to be more prepared and to conduct more effective conferences.

Want more information about this?  I found a video of a teacher explaining her conferring toolkit.  I thought it was really helpful.  Click here to view.  If you have tried this technique, I would love to hear how it has worked for you.

For more tips and techniques on conferring with young writers, I highly recommend these two books by Carl Andersen and Lucy Calkins.

Happy conferring!