CAFE™ - Tips on Conferring with Children (ARTICLE)
One of the biggest shifts we made when endeavoring to improve our conferring skills was to truly get up, move about, and start conferring with children one-on-one. We were accustomed to guided reading groups - staying in one area, and having the children come to us. Getting up and moving to confer with students can be a little scary at first, but once you begin, it's exciting. The first concern we had, and many teachers share, is about time. How long will each of these conferences take? How can we stay focused, given that there is so much we might tackle with each child? And what exactly is my role in the conference?
We begin with the goals from our assessments of students. To assess students, we begin each year by administering a DRA to those emergent readers who are just beginning to crack the code and read up to the end of second grade level. For those students who read at the third grade level and beyond, we administer the Burns and Roe IRI. Our whole class is given the Words Their Way assessment to guide our instruction with decoding and spelling patterns.
Once we've observed each child, talked with them, and gotten a sense of the child's strengths and needs, we're ready to set goals with them. The goals come from the assessments, and become the focus of each conference with the child. This focus eliminated our reliance on more formal conferring forms, where we posed questions and recorded student answers. We find that listening, coaching and guiding children is really the heart of the conference, not filling out the form.
The conferring forms provided in many assessment systems or professional books are often loaded with questions like: What are you reading now? What are your strengths as a reader? Tell me why you chose this book. And so on. It isn't that these aren't good questions, but there are too many of them. By the time you've conferred with two or three children, the reading workshop for the day may be over.
We've found the best use of our time in a conference is to observe and listen to the child read, teach and/or reinforce the strategy that will help them achieve their goal, observe as they practice the strategy, plan for the student's next step and encourage them to keep going! Instead of long conferences with detailed notes that may have little impact on the child's strategy work and immediate goal as a reader, we end up with brief, targeted contact and instruction for all students more frequently.
We are also teaching children to look more closely at where they are now as a reader, and where they might go tomorrow or over the next week. Many of the conference protocols we've seen look at what the child is reading at the moment, or ask him or her to talk about their whole life as a reader. With CAFÉ™, we're really looking at children's progress moment to moment, day to day and week to week rather than from the begining of the year to the end of the year. This will help children become more independent in tracking their progress and taking responsibility for it.
Knowing the student's goal saves valuable conference time. Instead of taking precious minutes with a child to determine a new goal or goals, the child begins from the starting point of knowing he/she is working on developing fluency or expanding vocabulary, etc.
Focus in Advance
We have a focus for most conferences before we even meet with the child again. When the child sees us walking up to them for the conference, they mentally begin to sort through what progress they have made toward their goal, and what topics around the goal we might discuss when we meet. We've also found that it's very hard for children to set meaningful reading goals without guidance or a concrete system. If you ask most children in the primary grades what their goal is as a reader, they are going to say, "I want to read chapter books." That's not really a goal that is going to move them forward in terms of understanding their strengths and needs as readers, or learn to monitor their reading growth independently.
One other important aspect of conferring with children is to develop a shared language around reading development. The language we use with students shapes their thinking about what reading is. We don't want our students to say "I want to get to the next level in (insert incentive program here)". We're helping them become comfortable with words like comprehension, accuracy, fluency, and vocabulary as they think about what it means to read and make progress as a reader.
After all, the main goal is for children to learn to read, love to read and choose to read. We believe this type of conference sets children well on the way to becoming life-long lovers of text.
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