Reset on Reading Conferences

School's out in three weeks: Gearing up our online library splash page for summer reading!

“Mrs. Essenburg! This talks about learning from failure, too!” a sixth grader whispered at me, excitedly waving her independently reading book, From an Idea to Google, across a sea of students silently buried in their own choice reading books. The surprising relationship between failure and success has been the topic of our whole-class readings, and this student just realized it is a much bigger topic than an English class unit. Making connections from a text to yourself, to the world, and to other texts is a vital strategy of effective readers, and this child is using it! Maybe because I've restarted reading conferences.

Conducting reading conferences with students is important not only for monitoring and encouraging their reading lives in general, and mentoring them in the types of conversations that readers have, but also for scaffolding the transfer of specific reading strategies. Unfortunately, I’ve found it all too easy this term to slide into frittering away my first 10 minutes of class, while students are reading their independent choice books, in organizational tasks—passing back papers, touching base with students who have been absent, connecting my laptop to the projector. These are tasks that have to get done sometime, but I’m losing the two most important things that have to happen while students are reading: modeling reading myself, and conferencing with students about what they are reading. This week, I got back on the conferencing bandwagon, and I’ve had some really interesting conversations.

Since we worked on determining a theme together as a class, asking individuals, “What is a theme of the book you’re reading?” is a great check on how they’re doing with transfer. When I asked the student reading The Wild Robot, he looked at me blankly. “What are some big ideas in the book?” I prompted, as I pointed to the poster of one-word big ideas on the wall. “Oh! Um...family…um…love,” he responded. “Okay, now put those into a sentence that tells me what the author believes about family and love.” He lit up: “Family love is important!” 

When I asked another student the same question about her fantasy book she ventured, “Well, the main character looks different from everybody else, but she keeps trying and finds she does have a gift…so I guess the theme would be, even if you don’t fit in, keep trying and you can succeed.” I considered this young woman with one Japanese parent and one American parent and then took the conversation one more step: “Does that theme connect to your life in any way?” She paused for a moment and then responded, “Yes, because I looked different from everybody in Japanese school I went to.”

Another student has devoured all the fantasy books in my classroom library that he finds interesting and has resigned himself to exploring other genres in the last few weeks. Curious about his findings, I asked him which of the non-fantasy books he’d enjoyed the most. He picked the one he was currently half-way through, The Last Cherry Blossom, about a Japanese girl living in Hiroshima during World War 2. Wondering whether he was saying that just because it was at hand and easy, I asked him, “What do you like about it?” He said because it connected with the novel we’d read as a class back in the winter, When My Name Was Keoko, about a Korean girl during the Japanese occupation of her country. The two books taught him about the experiences of two different people living through the same war on different sides. “Give me a specific,” I pressed. He answered, “They were both hungry.”

I’m still a novice at conducting reading conferences with students, but these and other conferences I conducted this week, and the further connections they’ve inspired, motivate me to keep practicing. It just takes two to three minutes per student, so I can do three or four a day. I plan to get around to every student once every two weeks. 

Sometimes I’m afraid I won’t be able to think of good questions, so when I walk around conferencing, I carry notecards with questions I can ask if I go blank. They come from Penny Kittle’s book Book Love: Developing Depth, Stamina, and Passion in Adolescent Readers, where she categorizes reading conferences into three types and gives typical questions for each:

Conferences That Monitor a Reading Life (Kittle 80)

• What are you reading? How did you choose it? How do you find good books?
• What’s on your to-read-next list? Which authors are your favorites?
• How much did you read last year?
• Do you consider yourself a reader? Where do you read at home?

Conferences That Teach a Reading Strategy (Kittle 82)

• How is the reading going for you?
• Is this an easy or a hard read for you? How do you know?
• Tell me about a time when this book has confused you and what you’ve done to get yourself back on track in your understanding.
• Tell me about these characters—who are they, what do you think of them?
• What questions are at the heart of this book? What questions might the author be trying to answer through the struggles of these characters?
• I see you’re almost finished with the book. When you think back over the way a character has changed in this story, can you point to specific moments when something was revealed about this character? Could you make a claim about this character and support it with evidence from the text?
• How is this book different from the last book you read?

Conferences That Increase Complexity and Challenge (Kittle 84-85)

• What else have you read by this author? What other books have you read that are as difficult as this one?
• Which books on your next list are challenging? Have you considered how to push yourself as a reader?
• Which genres have you read this year? Tell me about a genre you don’t usually read and let’s think about books that might ease the transition from what you love to what will challenge you to think differently.
• Tell me about a book you’ve dropped this year. Why did you drop it?
• How are the books you’ve been reading this year similar?

How about you? Do you conduct reading conferences with students? What questions do you ask? What great conversations do they prompt?