ASSESSMENT

Conferring

“Conferring with students is formative assessment at its best.” Kath Murdoch (“The Power of Inquiry 2015)

 

Being led by Kath Murdoch’s idea that conferring is inquiring into students’ learning, I decided to allocate time for a fortnightly conferring session and turn it into a routine.

My students change their home reading books in my EFL class 3 times a week.  It gives me a chance to discuss the books, their reading goals, and strategies.

At least once in a fortnight, I make sure I confer with each of my EAL students to find out more about their learning, where they are at and give them feedback and guidance.

We discuss how they feel about their reading progress, how they are moving towards their goals, what next steps they have to take to improve their skills.  This opportunity to confer with each child helps me to meet their individual language needs better.

It also supports my professional growth as an educator.  In order to make my conferring with students more deliberate and structured, I have to improve my questioning skills. Conferring has influenced my planning tremendously as I am able to differentiate better based on the individual students’ needs. 

Conferring helps the teacher to understand the students better, find out more about their learning styles and provides a lot of information for report writing and liaising with parents.

My conversations with parents become more meaningful and the exchange of strategies more productive. During such conversation an educator has the opportunity to learn about family literacy practices or the lack of them, discuss goals and expectations in child development, and last but not least upgrade the rapport with parents.

EAL In Class Support 

In Miss Anita's and Mr. James's rooms the students enthusiastically follow the Daily Five routines. If any parents want to learn more about the Daily Five routines and support their children at home they can find some useful information here. 

This week I supported our EAL students in their word work and helped them to research the chosen words and make sentences with them. At times I wore the hat of a reading partner, modeled engaged and respectful listening and questioning strategies. I also had a chance to confer with my Full Support EAL students. I listened to their reading and asked them what they thought about their reading skills, their strengths, and challenges. I provided immediate feedback. My students talked to me about their reading goals and we discussed the best next steps for each child. These sessions provided a lot of information for my assessment and planning and helped me to meet the language needs of my students better.

Listening to reading is a very popular task.

During our math time, the Grade 3 students investigated what a kilogram is. The task was to fill three plastic bags with rice. (100g, 500g and 1kg).  Everybody had lots of fun, some rice was spilled, some students learned how to read the scales and finally, the three bags were full.

Gunn really enjoyed the activity.

Shintaro was very precise in his estimation of what one kilogram of rice would look and weigh like.

In all Grade 3 classrooms, the students were busy completing the summative assessment of the unit of inquiry. In Miss Lisa's room the presentations were very successful and the audience learned a lot of interesting facts about various biomes and animal and plant adaptation.

Yuzuka practiced hard and her presentation was one of the best.

In my EFL class,  I chose for my students to complete comprehension tasks about biomes and animal and plant adaptation to provide more information for my students and support them in their research for the summative assessment.

Independent work on comprehension tasks during the EFL class

On Friday I also found time to confer with my students about their home reading programme and all 9 individual conferences went very well and were very productive.

I complemented Raymond on his book choice and we also discussed some useful reading strategies that Raymond should use.