Making it Manageable: Feedback at Every Step
by Tricia Ebarvia
Conferring with students can be exhausting. Sometimes a single conference can take 10-15 minutes, and if you have 100+ students, conferring is also incredibly time consuming. Time spent conferring with students is time away from whole class instruction, curricular planning, and much-needed grading. But feedback from conferring is invaluable. When I was in the Writing Institute two years ago, I emailed Penny Kittle for some advice. I was struggling with how to fit all the elements of the workshop model outlined in her book Write Beside Them. When I mentioned reducing time for conferring, her response was unequivocal. “Conferring is our most powerful teaching time,” she responded. “Everyone learns best in the context of their own writing piece, so we have to work it into practice.”
Still, time is always the issue. Read more
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