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!