Angelica Guevara Blog #4 – November: Student Conferencing and Data Driven Instruction

I have been conferencing with my students during independent reading time. Sometimes I have sat next to them and listened while taking notes on miscues, errors, and their sneaky yet tactful way of omitting words they don’t know. I try to be sneaky myself as I observe them without them knowing I am listening to their reading. Other times I have asked an individual student to conference with me. I tell him/her to read to me and to listen to some “special” advice I have just for him/her. There is one particular student who I have had for 3 years and is one of my chosen students for the focus group. He is in 5^th grade and was working on a 1.5 independent reading level for the past year and a half.  I think he has matured some in the past few months and has begun to realize that he has a responsibility as a student to work hard if he wants to learn. He has become more self-conscious of his work, he is working harder and his confidence has increased. He has moved up 2 months in reading level since the beginning of the year. All of the students in my focus group have moved up at least 1 month in reading ability since September, that for a self-contained student is a big jump. During our conferencing in the first months of school, I noticed they wouldn’t even try to read a word they did not know. They would ask me or other peers for help with the word. That led me to instruct them to try reading the word before asking for help. I started to make them write the word down before asking me how to read it and then I had them break down phonemes and blend the word together. Making them do extra work was not fun for them, so they started trying to blend the word before asking for help. At times they are still unable to blend unknown words but at least they try now and that has helped them to read better than they were 3 months ago. Now when they aren’t able to read the word, they will come to me and try to read it to the best of their knowledge. Once I see why they are having a difficult time reading the word I am able to do a mini lesson on that particular phonetic sound or blending combination. The students in my focus group have all increased in reading ability and comprehension thanks our conferencing and guided mini lessons. One of the problems I noticed they were having was understanding the different sounds the vowels make (short and long). Seeing this allowed me to concentrate mini lessons on (oo) long o (ee) long e sounds. For example when (oo) is together it makes the (long o) sound and same for (ee). Now they come up to me every time they see the words they so strongly focused on (teeth, meet, soon, moon) and brag about knowing the long vowel sounds.