Personal Narrative Revision Conferences

This week I have been conferencing with my students about their personal narratives as they are revising. I still feel like such a conferring novice, but here are some of the points that I am learning as I go along.

*While I am still developing my conferring skills in general, it was perfect to have the notes that I took from when I was reading drafts over the break right in my conferring document. I wrote areas of improvement/suggestions/comments I would want to make in the next step column. It was great to have that as a guide for my conferences. As I conferred I gauged how much my students seemed ready to absorb and at times I adjusted my original plan to mention less of my comments and to add others to long term goals of areas to improve. It was nice to go into the conference with a plan. However, I realize that sometimes it is challenging to have a good turn around of reading all of my students' drafts outside of class. Next time I am going to try reading partial drafts in class and giving suggestions along the way in a more consistent, systematic way, rather than collecting all as a complete draft. Not only do I think this will save time outside of class, but I think I will be more efficient. Now that I have my system for electronic anecdotal notes set up, I think this will work much better. Then I will still read their final published drafts and take notes as I did with this set of drafts to continue to guide future instruction and areas to build on.

*While conferencing, it is so fulfilling to hear students say, "I remembered you said before..." Watching student growth unfold before my eyes is such an amazing experience.

*One advantage to reading the drafts outside of class was that I was able to create a list of general trends that I was noticing in student writing. Before conferencing individually, I posted and discussed a list of ideas to consider while revising with my students. Then by the time that I got to many students they had already revised their drafts with the ideas in mind. It was an excellent way to see what my students were able to do on their own. It did not take me long to realize that I should start each of my conferences with, "What have you revised so far?" Often students stated that they made a revision based on a teaching point. When they showed examples, they demonstrated that they had made meaningful steps along the way and opened up a perfect opportunity to give authentic scaffolding specific to their writing piece or to further develop a good start they had on the concepts. If they had not tried out the suggested ideas yet, then I talked to them about example revisions using their draft. Next time when I try reading drafts/partial drafts in class I will still keep a running list of common trends and address them at the start of writing workshops as needed, and I will always start .