Writing Conference

Today was my first official writing "conference" with Leo. However, I have been having conversations like this with him about his writing all semester. My goal today was to see if I could stretch his learning beyond his comfort zone - he usually draws pictures with one-letter labels. I wanted to encourage him to try and sound out more than one letter in his words. He does not take risks with his writing, and I'd like him to start doing so.

I used Katie Wood Ray's format for the Architecture of a Conference, which starts with assessment. I saw that Leo was drawing a picture of a volcano. He added various elements, such as an eruption, lava streaming down the sides, and several dinosaurs. I asked him when he was going to label it, and he told me that he didn't have to until after he colored it. However, I told him that if he wanted, his teacher wouldn't mind if he labeled it before he colored. He labeled "D" for dinosaur. Now came my teaching point. I asked him, "Do you think you could stretch out that word to hear some other sounds?" He immediately did so completely independently, and was able to spell out "DNSR." This helped me to see that he is in fact able to hear and identify consonant sounds, and needs work on vowel sounds. For now, though, I asked him for next time to try this out on his own. This is the "Clear Vision" part of Ray's conferencing technique. Next time I conference with him, I will look for whether or not he is trying to write out entire words instead of the first letter.

Reflection
The way writing is taught in this classroom doesn't exactly align with my own beliefs. Reading About the Authors, by Katie Wood Ray and Lisa B. Cleaveland, brought my attention to the fact that writing should be specific and intentional. This means that the decision making plays a huge part in the writing process - something I hadn't thought about before. I now see that a child knowing exactly what they want to write and taking the steps to do so independently shows that they are real writers. Just because a child can put letters on a page doesn't meant they are a writer, and it certainly doesn't mean that they are interested in writing. It's still a bit unclear to me how I could facilitate this independence, however. the idea that evaluation of a student's writing (instead of an assessment - by evaluation I mean placing a score or value on it) is harmful and places value or lack of value really stuck with me. I'd never thought of it that way before. Spelling tests and red marks were always a part of my life that I'd accepted as a child, but now I'm questioning whether or not that's the way it should be. I don't think I would want to use these kinds of assessments in my own classroom. However, I do know that what Wood Ray describe as a "writer-centered" curriculum is the one I want to use. That is, a curriculum in which students guide their own learning by investigating what interests them and what they want to know.