Jigsaw: Salch and Marino (Eds). School talk: The importance of Listening

The article “The Importance of Listening” focuses on the art of conferences with students during writing workshop. The great minds of Ralph Fletcher, Carl Anderson, and Yvonne Siu-Runyan all offer their own professional opinion about how to conduct the most beneficial conference. The big idea that I took away from these authors is that you have “to teach the writer, not the writing”. Meaning, it is important to teach the writer how to use specific strategies in their own writing. If you focus on the actual writing and are only marking up mechanical errors then the student faces being embarrassed and forever turned off on writing or sharing their writing. These are not the ideas we want to establish from writing workshop. Writing workshop is supposed to be a time for the students to happily and confidently experiment with different ideas, techniques, or strategies. This is a time for the student to grow as a writer. If you are consistently negatively criticizing their work the student will become distant and will no longer want to use this workshop time to try anything new and the student will no longer grow as a writer.

I have started conferencing with my students during writing workshop (especially the at risk students) and have found it difficult to extract useful information from the students. Because I cannot get this information from them it is hard for me to teach the writer good strategies for the task at hand. These issues are the main reason why I chose this article to read. When I approach a student I open with the question “How are things going for you?” or “What can you tell me about your writing?” Sometimes students are eager to share and will specifically ask me to read their work. With both cases I have had trouble trying to decide the best way to approach the conference. I know that the writer’s notebook is not a place for marking up a piece and editing it to death. For the most part the students just give me a general “okay” if things are going well for them and a shrug if things aren’t going well. A majority of the students have difficulties coming up with ideas. These are what our mini lessons have mostly focused on. For most of the students, as I walk pass them I give them a thumbs up a thumb-middle or a thumb down. This is supposed to be a silent question of how that student is coming along with their work. If the student responds with a thumb-middle or down then I will sit down and conference about ideas or make sure the student understands the task.

I think it would be beneficial for me to focus on this idea of teaching the writer NOT the writing. This way the students who do not write as much don’t feel like they did not accomplish anything. The workshop has to be done at the writer’s own pace and I need to accept that and teach strategies to these writers based on what stage they are at in becoming an independent writer.
The video examples of successful writing workshop and conferencing has helped me to visualize how to approach teaching in the writing workshop model. The students need to see concrete examples of exactly what it is we are trying to focus on. The students need to work at their own pace and I need to be prepared for conferencing with students at all different levels. I would like to try to work in peer conferences and more author sharing. I think it is important to celebrate the students who are doing well and have the class pick apart what they did so that everyone can apply those strategies to their next writing piece.