So all your students are reading independently during class time. They may have the required textbook open to page 728 to read a Ray Bradbury short story. They may all have their own choice-reading books because you just returned from the library (if your school is fortunate enough to actually have one). They may even have copies of the latest Scope magazine. The point is that they are actually reading during class time.
Now what do you do? You read a great book or article about conferring over the summer, so you are ready to give reading conferences a try, but the whispers of doubt creep in: You think: But everyone is quiet and happy. I don’t want to interrupt them. You think: Should I be reading, too? All that SSR and DEAR says I should be modeling what good readers do, but, hey, if they are reading, then they can’t see me modeling, and isn’t what’s going on in my mind and heart more important than my book-reading posture? You think: Maybe I will just take this opportunity to send a few parent emails or read those surveys I gave them yesterday.
While getting administrative work done is tempting, don’t do it. Instead, start conversations. When students are reading is the golden opportunity for you to do the very important work of teachers that is neglected in so many PDs and teacher ed programs: reading instruction and assessment.
3 Goals of a Reading Conference
- Assess who they are as human beings: Tell me about what are you reading. Do you have any experiences with this (whatever is going on in the text)? Why did you choose this text or what would you have chosen to read? What are you doing after school today? Tell me about your “typical” after-school routine.
- Assess their comprehension of the text: What’s going on? How do you know? Read that paragraph. What seems to be most important in that paragraph? How do you know? Tell me about why the author might have written this book, created that interaction, titled the chapter this way.
- Plan for instruction: What in your reading is unfamiliar? What do you want to understand better? What is a word or phrase in this that is unfamiliar? What are you noticing about the author’s writing style?
All of this is assessment. You are monitoring, observing, asking questions and gathering information for future instruction. You are also getting to know your students and how to personalize lesson plans, attend to their needs.
And you are teaching one-on-one in these moments (differentiating), but this is not the typical teaching that you might do by preparing a slide-show or writing a lesson plan. You must, in the moment, have a few tools you can draw upon. In these conferring moments, I draw from learning theory and psychology to help. As a former social worker, solution-focused conversations access schemas (prior knowledge and life experience) to stimulate ways of thinking that are self-reflective, productive, context-based, and autonomy-geared.
4 Solution-Focused Techniques to Coach Inferential Thinking
Below are a few thought experiments to help engage your student-readers in more inferential thinking about their reading. Anchor these conversations in their reading. Ask for them to show you passages or sentences that support or stimulate their thinking.
- Try “the miracle question.” This is a goal-setting question when your student does not know how to imagine the future. Perhaps in your conference, a student wants to talk about a problem with a friend or family member. Now, you know that if it is serious that you should contact a school social worker, but this is stress about balancing school and work or this is about priorities or even self-doubt. Try this: Suppose tonight, while you slept, a miracle occurred. When you awake tomorrow, you what would be some of the things you would notice that would tell you life had suddenly gotten better? A follow-up question would be this: How would that make a difference in your life? The miracle question shifts the student from a problem-focused frame toward a visionary context. This questioning can also be used to focus on a character in the story if you would like to distance the conversation: Tell me about a character in your book who is struggling. What would be their miracle, and how would that change things?
- The “empty chair.” The empty chair was first popularized by Fritz Perls, a founder of gestalt therapy. This is an imaginative experience where the student imagines someone in a chair (a character, author, friend, historical figure) and begins a conversation. Then, the student imagines how the person would respond, taking up the chair from a different perspective. This engages the sometimes passivity of a student and encourages perspective-taking and problem-solving in context because the student-reader must draw on context from the text in order to engage in these conversations.
- “Voice Dialogue.” If a student is reading a novel, there is a good chance that a character is feeling ambivalence or has doubt about things they’ve done or might do (think Prince Hamlet, Dally from The Outsiders). You might help the student-reader articulate that by saying something like: It sounds like the main character is torn. On one hand, he wants….but on the other side, there is…How would you talk to the first side of this character? What would you say is driving this side? Now, let’s move to the other side. What would you say to that side of the character? This separates the selves of the character and encourages a closer examination of meaning but also a consciousness of the complexity of human decisions. What you are talking about is motive but also personality and relationships that pull at characters (and our students). This strategy can really help students (and teachers) understand choices and implications for characters.
- “Head-on Collision” conversation: Another question you can pose during the reading conference is for those characters who are highly resistant or single-minded in seemingly self-defeating ways. This conversation begins with a summary: Let’s take a look at what’s happening here. The characters says they want X, but every time they have a chance to move closer to that, they do something to mess it up. Some questions you can pose include the following: How might the character be distancing themselves from people who want to be close? What decisions has the character made that have been destructive — what pain, loss, or suffering has the character experienced because of it? What trauma in the past is the character clinging to or making it difficult to trust? What does the character need to heal? What do you think the author will create in the plot to help this (or not)?
In each of these thought-experiments, the student is encouraged to infer and see how reading, at the secondary level especially, is about something more than identifying plot elements. Reading conferences at the high school level must match the development of the students who are now more capable of abstract reasoning (Piaget) and identity exploration (Erikson).
In some of these conversations, the student may share stories of their own life, connecting to or empathizing with the main character in the story. You will learn a lot about the student as a reader and human being, be sure to listen and remember the best follow-up statements: tell me more and what makes you say so.
Another note about reading conferences. Go to the readers. Whisper. Spend just a few minutes with each. Move on. You can probably talk to a few each day. Then, jot down some notes about what you talked about. I like to keep a notebook with one page for each student and just work my way through the pages each week, a technique suggested by Penny Kittle.
Next time your students are reading in class, use that time to do some personalized instruction in the form of conversation. This is formative assessment in its most beautiful and humane form.