Conferencing with students on Writing

There was so much great information on this chapter on Conferencing with Students in the Writing Essentials book. It has been impressive how the optimal learning model has been used throughout the book - even to how you would teach student the process of self-editing and doing student-student conferencing.

I will be doing my student teaching in a 4th grade classroom and one of my concerns is teaching writing. The line on page 226:

Because most of us have had so little professional development on how to teach writing well, many of us lack the skills and confidence to help writers hone and clarify their messages.

resonated with me. My Master Teacher is very confident in the Lucy Caulkins curriculum they use to teach writing, but I still feel this is one area where I will have a hard time teaching the students.

Many of the ideas in this chapter, and book, will be useful and helpful. The concept that a student must leave the conference "eager to continue writing" not "deflated and discourage". This is a great lesson for all teaching! Any interation with students should strive for this. That is not to say you cannot correct their work, but you must do it in a positive manner. Always start with a compliment is an important first step. Then chose one or two things to focus on in the conference and end with a comment of support.

I also liked the idea of how our conferencing - or any discussion of writing - should focus foremost on the message. Let that be the major concept. The editing for grammar, spelling, etc, is important - but that more quickly becomes the responsibility of the student to monitor and correct and is, therefore, less the focus for the teacher. The students I will be working with are fourth grade, so this is a time when the students should have learned to be mostly responsible for their own editing.

These last two comments were not from the Routman book, and deal more with student to student type conferencing, but these are good things to remember. The first was the list of questions that NP had us use when we were editing our vignettes. Questions like:
What words do you remember?
How does the piece make you feel?
What do you want to know more about?

Or another set of questions that someone said their MT used was:
I like ___________. What if ______________?