Instructional Conversations: The Practicum Student Experience

So...... I did my instructional conversation, and I think it went pretty well!  If I haven't said before, I am in a first grade classroom doing my practicum.  For this conversation, I worked with three boys from my excelled reading group.  The students from this group are reading at an extremely high level, but don't really get a challenge that often.  I chose them because of this, and I was thoroughly impressed with how they did.

Lucky Beans by Becky Birtha--goodreads

My purpose for the conversation was to discover and discuss underlying themes in a story.  We read the book Lucky Beans by Becky Birtha.  This book is set during the Great Depression.  It is about an African-American boy whose father has lost his job, and whose mother is doing a little work sewing clothes for people in the neighborhood.  There is a contest at a local store, where whoever can guess the number of beans in the jar will win a brand new sewing machine.  The boy ends up entering in the contest and wins.  The book has some major themes about the struggles of living during the Great Depression and helping out family.  There is one point in the story where a girl tells the main character he can't participate in the contest because of his race, but the whole story doesn't focus on this theme.

We read the book together, and I started our conversation by just asking what they thought of the story.  I wasn't sure if the students would really say much, since a lot of time I do get one word answers like "good" or "okay", but these boys surprised me.  They started the conversation by talking about the parts they liked, when one of the boys brought up the scene with the girl.  He began talking about how he didn't like how she treated Marshall, the main character, and that it isn't right that everyone wouldn't be able to participate.  The boys began discussing this, connecting it to things like allowing everyone to play at recess or sit at the lunch table with them.  I was impressed with how they brought this up and related it to things they have been discussing during guidance.

Another really cool thing that happened is the boys started talking about what they thought happened after the story ended.  They were shooting out ideas about the parents getting good jobs, the family getting enough money to buy a bigger house, and even the girl apologizing to the main character.  They were so excited about all of their ideas that I ended up changing the end of the lesson and giving them the chance to write and extended ending to the story.

I definitely think I had a successful experience with an instructional conversation, and it is definitely a huge relief.  As I said, I was a little worried as to how this was going to go, but these boys did great and even  went further than I thought they would go!  This lesson really solidified how much I like instructional conversations.  Of course, they probably won't all go this well but I still think they are more useful and educational in the long run.

I would love to hear if anyone else has done an instructional conversation and how it went.  Comment below!

Instructional Conversations

When I heard the words "instructional conversation" for the first time, I assumed this was what every teacher did, all day, every day.  But after learning more about it, I realized that I was very wrong.  There is so much more that goes into it, and it is definitely worth it for your students in the long run.

First off, I should probably explain what an instructional conversation is.  According to Claude Goldenberg, in his article Instructional Conversations: Promoting comprehension through discussion, an instructional conversation is an engaging interaction between students that "promote analysis, reflection, and critical thinking" (317).  These types of discussion focuses on teaching something through open conversation with the students.  The students should be working off of each other, instead of the teacher asking a question and one student answering.  He explains how this kind of interaction creates an optimal learning space, and the students have to use higher order thinking skills throughout the conversation.  During this, the teacher should have some questions and/or talking points prepared for when the conversation dies down, but overall the teacher should sit back, be a mediator, and let the students lead.

After reading Goldenberg's article I realized that this definitely doesn't always happen in the classroom.  It is very difficult and time consuming to set up a classroom like this, and I think that is why a lot of teachers don't do it all the time.  Also, it is very difficult to think an instructional conversation could be used during a subject like math; where there is actually one right answer. 

I definitely get how hard this can be to implement, but I am going to try to use this in my future classroom as much as I can.  It is a great way for the students to use critical thinking, and to practice social skills that will be important later in life. 

I will be doing one of these instructional conversations for my class, so stay tuned for how it goes.

Here's a couple of links to websites and tips for instructional conversations:

Education.com IC article
Summary of Goldenberg by Ronald Gallimore

Writing Analysis

This last week I got to work on writing with my students.  Their assignment was to create a creature, brought about from the book they are reading, and to write at least five details about it.  The students I worked with thought up some amazing creations, and had a lot of fun writing them.  For example, one of my students created a stub person who can shape shift, do magic and live in Wyoming (I had to laugh when I read where he lived because it was so random!).  Another student created a falcon that changes size based on whether they smell something clean or stinky.  I was incredibly impressed with everything they were thinking up as well as how motivated they were to write about them.

When it comes to talking about their writing, many of these students wrote with lots of detail.  They have been working on adding adjectives and more detail to their sentences in class, so I focused this assignment on this.  They wrote a lot about what their stub people could do, where they lived, and their appearance.  I expected these would be the topics they would write about, but they really surprised me in the amount of detail some of them added.   

Another thing that surprised me was the flexibility these students had. They were coming into roadblocks when it came to spelling, and they didn’t get frustrated by words they couldn’t spell.  Any time a student couldn’t spell a word, and asked me how it was spelled, I redirected them to other ways they could find how to spell it.  They started asking each other how to spell words, they looked through book, and then began helping each other look in the dictionary that I provided for them.  I observed this happen throughout their work time, and was impressed at how quickly they stopped asking me to get an answer; but used other resources to figure it on their own.

These students worked so hard on their writing, and it definitely shows.  I think they had a lot more ideas that they shared through conversation with their peers and me that they didn’t write down.  At first, I was worried by this.  When I began to see the difference between what they were discussing and what they wrote down, I thought they were just avoiding the assignment or something along those lines.  After thinking about it, I decided that wasn't the case.  I realized that even though they were doing more talking than writing, they were still learning through their discussion.  They discussed ideas and details, and asked for help when needed.  Even though they didn’t write down everything they discussed with their peers, it still shows that they learned through their responses to each other, and how they worked through the assignment. 

I thought this writing assignment went really well with these students, and they have begun to ask if they can create more.  This is really exciting for me, since I was a little worried about how they would take this assignment on.  I'm definitely going to keep this in mind when creating new assignments for these students!

Some reflection....

Throughout this semester in Lit. III I have gained a ton of information that is just adding to my sureness that I have chosen the right career.  We have discussed a lot of big ideas surrounding teaching, and I have been able to firmly establish some overarching teaching beliefs that will be the basis for how and why I do what I do in my future classroom.  Even with these beliefs there have been a few things I still struggle with sometimes. One of those things I find the most important is assessment.

Yes, assessment.  That word that people seem to cringe at now-a-days.  I don't want to come off sounding like I think assessment is bad, because I don't.  Assessing the students in your classroom throughout the year is extremely important.  It can serve as a way to obtain background knowledge of what your students already know, a way for you to determine how you should begin a unit or lesson, as well as a way for you to decide when your class is ready to move forward.  On top of that, assessment gives you insight into how you, the teacher, are doing.  You can use it as an assessment of how you are teaching and if you need to make adjustments.  

Assessment doesn't have a set of steps or rules, or a nice little "how-to" book that every teacher is given during their first year of teaching.  It varies between districts, schools, teachers, etc.; and is almost always based off of research from many different viewpoints.  Because of this, everybody has a different idea on assessment and how it should be implemented.  This is pretty easy for me to accept because, to be honest, what part of being an educator doesn't come with about a hundred different opinions and ways to do it? The hard part is how do you decide which opinion is best? 

I think this is the most difficult to figure out when assessing a student's writing.  Writing is such a broad subject to teach, and is portrayed differently by everyone.  Of course, as a teacher you can set some boundaries or expectations of your students' writing such as having them write in a certain genre, giving them expectations, etc.; but you won't see one finished paper that is the same.  This is what makes assessing writing so difficult for me.  You are supposed to somehow take a writing assignment you gave to 20+ different children, then assess every single one the same way.  So, I come back to the question how do I do this?

We have discussed this question a lot in class, and great ideas have been passed back and forth that I fully agree with and think would be great to implement in my future classroom.  A lot of the ideas I really like come from the one and only, Debbie Miller.  She is a firm believer in formative assessment.  In her book, Teaching with Intention, she talks a lot about the different ways a teacher can assess a students' writing by consistently checking in with them throughout the writing process.  I love this!  This kind of conferencing, throughout the student's writing process, keeps the teacher informed as well as gives them the ability to assess progress instead of just product.  By using this, a teacher can keep record of what each child is writing, where they are getting stuck, and what is going on in their minds while writing.  A teacher can also gain a relationship with each student, and the student is able to learn and practice how to reflect on their own writing.  How much of that would be obtained by just looking at a finished paper? 

Miller has given me some great ideas on assessing writing, and I know that a lot of what I have read from her is what I would like to implement in my classroom.  Even though, I am still struggling with exactly how I will do this, I know this will definitely be something that I keep looking to.

I also am open to more tips and knowledge from others on this topic.  I always love to hear new ideas to make myself better!

Here's a link if you would like to take a look at Teaching with Intention