Lucy Calkins' Conferring and Learning to Confer (chapters 13 & 14)
Chapter 13, "Conferring," reminds us that our ultimate goal is to help our students become independent writers. It doesn't take long for them to progress toward this goal by conferring with themselves. With just a little practice, most kids can think of questions other students would ask them and use these ideas to keep improving their writing.
I love the image Calkins gives us: "Writing allows us to put our thoughts on the page and in our pockets; writing allows us to pull back and ask questions of our thoughts." It is hard to grasp the idea of my thoughts being made tangible and placed in a pocket, but it reminds us just how amazing written language (even spoken language, really) is.
Calkins also has great things to say about getting to know our student writers, listening to them, and learning to tell them what they need to hear rather than what we want fixed in their work. Then she ends with the reminder that we are not trying to build classrooms of cloned teachers, but classrooms of independent thinkers who can write with their own voices.
Chapter 14 takes us through different types of conferences and how to use them. It begins, though, with the caution that "we try so hard to be helpful we forget to be real" and "Sometimes the purpose of a conference is simply to respond." No matter how much we want to improve a student's work or increase a student's learning, we must remember that building a relationship with them and recognizing them as valuable individuals is crucial to their success and ours.
The various types of conferences and their descriptions were also valuable, and I can see that it will take practice to become skilled at productively conferring with students.
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