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.