Reading conferences provide the most useful opportunities for formative assessment of students’ reading – assessment for teaching and learning (Snowball & Bolton, 2010)

Now that Classroom Libraries and Independent Reading were “up and running” throughout the school, we needed to delve deeper into what skills our students were using to help them read and how we could assist them to progress further. First of all, teachers filled out a Class Library checklist to see where they were at in terms of their development with their Class Libraries (see photo). Staff also completed an online survey of their understanding of running records and when/how they used them to inform their teaching. This data will be used to identify where our learning needs are as a staff in this area so we can address these “gaps” through PD over the next couple of terms. We also revisited choosing “Just Right” books at one of our staff meetings, looking at the iPick strategy as one way of helping students with book self selection.

I can pick a Good Fit book based on …

Purpose – Why are you reading the text?

Interest – Why are you interested in the book?

Comprehend – Do you understand what you are reading?

Know – Do you know most of the words?

In Weeks 4 and 6 of Term 3, we undertook half day PD sessions with staff working in teams (Junior Primary, Middle Primary and Upper Primary) to learn about implementing reading conferences with our students and setting up Reading logs/journals.

During the session, we did some professional reading from Dianne Snowball, Faye Bolton, Carl Anderson and Ralph Fletcher about the components of a good reading conference. We learnt that conferences need to focus on what students are doing as readers and that teachers need to provide students with feedback about their strengths and help them suggest the next goal. This needs to be recorded, including the “next steps” for the student and how they are going to achieve them. Students need to be active participants too, responding to texts they are reading and articulating the strategies they are practising and using. We looked at various footage showing teachers conducting reading conferences with their students to clarify and confirm the main components of a good reading conference.

In groups, we perused a wide variety of reading journal entries then discussed and documented what students would be recording in their journal entries to show the evidence of the learning taking place.