Conferencing with middle school students
One-on-one conferences are one of the pillars of Reading
Essentials Class. Reading Essentials is
a reading intervention class at our middle school. Each day the other teacher and I sit and
conference with students. The focus of
the conference is identifying areas of strengths and weakness in the student’s
oral reading as well as assessing their comprehension. Together with the student, we set goals for
the student’s read to self time for the upcoming week.
Because there are two
teachers and student numbers around 10 per class, we are able to conference
about one time a week for each student. Each
conference lasts between 10 – 15 minutes.
Oral Reading Assessment We monitor the students’ fluency,
decoding, and expression by hearing them read.
The students use the book they are currently reading during read to self
time. We then discuss our observations
with the students. This reminds them the
important aspects of oral reading and they can try to implement suggestions
during the following week. Each
conference begins with looking at the goal from the previous conference and
discussing the progress being made toward the goal.
We use the
CAFÉ Menu ® to align the
goals with their students’ areas of difficulty. The areas are comprehension, fluency,
accuracy (decoding) and expand vocabulary.
I use expand vocabulary when the student is doing well with all other
areas. Reading Essentials is a reading
intervention and most of the students struggle in comprehension, fluency or
accuracy.
Student
Accountability The student
conference always puts accountability into Read to Self because we monitor the
books and pages read by the students. We
record the page number(s) that we heard the student read. Sometimes their goal for the week is a set
number of pages to be read daily. For
some of these students, daily consistent reading is new to them. Even sticking with one book can be difficult
for some. We discourage jumping from one
book to another although if a student really doesn’t like a book, we allow them
to make another choice.
Comprehension After listening to a student read, we then
assess their comprehension. We may ask
them to retell the passage in their own words or ask them questions based on
the reading. If we determine that they are
struggling with comprehension, we take out our
CAFÉ Menu ® sheet, and
look at the comprehension strategies. We
always begin with
Check for Understanding. I set the frequently of the checking for
understanding on how much difficulty the student is having. I may have them stop and check for
understanding every page or every paragraph if needed.
Many students complain about conferencing and state that
they do so much better reading silently.
I encourage them by saying that most people read better silently but
that it is important for me to hear them read so we can accurately set goals
and help them improve.
I have found no better way for me to help students with
reading difficulties. Our conferences
make it very clear where their difficulties are and the one-on-one attention is
a real personalization of education.
