Mini-conferences

So, this morning Mrs. C decides to let me know that she'll be "gone for a few hours in the afternoon" and hopes that I would be interested in "taking over" for her while she's out. Technically there was also a sub (district policy since I'm not yet licensed), but she sat at Mrs. C's desk and read a romance novel the majority of the time. I think she said a total of 5 words to the kids. I was on my own.

Its only my second day of student teaching -- and, to be honest, I wasn't sure I'd be up to a full afternoon of being in charge of 21 fourth graders. But honestly, at that point, its not like you can say "no." So I went with it. And it turned out great. Everyone was SO well behaved, they were quiet and focused and kind to each other. I was very impressed. We did the second half of our "Whole Language" lesson (Reading responses to a short story), corrected the "Daily Edit," wrote in our journals (in honor of the upcoming September 11th, they were assigned to brainstorm reasons why they are proud to be an American). Then, lunch, recess, and a whole school assembly (good timing). They came back at the end of the day and worked on their "Me-Tees" (designing t-shirts that represent them) while listening to the Star Wars soundtrack.

Here's the part that I was really proud of: While the kids were at lunch, I read through all of their reading responses. I sorted them into two piles - kids who seemed to understand the assignment and fully answered the questions, and those who didn't. While they were working independantly on their "Me-Tees," I had mini-conferences with each kid who had a problem with their reading responses. One by one I called them back to my desk and we went over their responses together. I gave them compliments on the parts I liked, and had them explain to me their thinking on the parts that presented problems for me. We talked about ways to make the responses stronger, and then they revised their responses at the back table and turned them back into me.

I felt like this was really constructive -- the rest of the class was working on an individual project, and I was able to spend some one-on-one time with the kids who had difficulty with earlier work. The majority of their revised responses were great. Much improved. However, even after we talked, neither Ke or Br seemed to really "get" it. I need to find better ways of explaining things to them... it seemed like they got it when we were talking, and then I got their work back, and it was entirely different than I was expecting. They still didn't answer the questions the way they were supposed to, and I'm 100% sure that Ke has no idea what "describe the setting" of the story means. Even so, at the end of the day I felt like the kids who were having trouble were now more comfortable with what we are looking for in their response writing. And that made me feel really good.