RADICAL LISTENING: INDIVIDUAL READING AND WRITING CONFERENCES, EQUITY AND IDENTITY

Workshop Overview

Individual conferences are the most powerful teaching we do with young readers and writers. These 1:1 meetings with children are not just our best opportunity to target literacy instruction to their particular strengths and needs, but also to honor individual student identity. By inquiring into their thinking and tailoring instruction to their unique noticings, understandings, and experiences, we empower children to become independent reading and writing problem solvers - and send a powerful message about equity and inclusion. 

Though there are separate books and resources about both reading and writing conferences, they are rarely talked about in the same conversation - yet most teachers who are doing one are also doing the other, with the same group of students. Lucy Calkins has famously said we should teach children to “read like writers and write like readers.” Individual conferences are perhaps the best place to help students understand these connections and make links between their reading and their writing. Moreover, they are a powerful way to teach students “to shape their own ideas through acts of literacy” (Muhammad 2020). 

Learning Outcomes

By the end of the workshop, participants will: 

• learn a concrete, practical, step-wise approach to conferring in both reading and writing;

• be provided with strategies for formative assessment in literacy;

• be trained in principles of listening that honor individual student identity; 

• develop a repertoire of “go-to” conferences in reading and writing;

• generate concrete, classroom-ready organizational systems for keeping track of student work in conferences;

• leave with practical tips for helping students make reading-writing connections through conferring.