Conferring with Students Who’ve Experienced Childhood Trauma

Mrs. Anthony is a third grade teacher with a classroom of 26 diverse students. This year, she has more students than ever who seem to struggle with emotional regulation, attention, and peer interactions. During recent professional development in her school, she and her colleagues have had the opportunity to start to learn about how the effects of childhood trauma can present themselves in school. Through the lens of trauma, Mrs. Anthony is working to take a careful inventory of her own practices and decisions in the classroom, working to create a calm, predictable, and safe place for learning to unfold every day. As she does so, she begins to wonder about how her conferring practice might intersect with the needs and/or triggers of her students who are experiencing chronic trauma in their lives. 

No matter where you teach, what your class size, or how long you’ve been in the business, chances are you’re working to build more skills yourself for meeting the needs of students whose exposure to traumatic life experiences is interfering with school success.

This Week’s Quote, September 2nd

“When we see healthy reading habits in action in the elementary classroom, we’ll see students who are aware of personal preferences and are intentional about nurturing their own reading lives.”– page 97

 

If you want to read more, you can visit the Stenhouse website to order your own copy of our book, To Know and Nurture a Reader; Conferring with Confidence and Joy.  If you’d like to be part of the conversation, come on over and join our To Know and Nurture a Reader Facebook Group. If you want more content like this delivered right to your inbox, click the Follow button below and  you’ll never miss a post.

We’re so glad to have you with us on our learning journey.  – Kari & Christina

Challenge #12: Map out 3-4 ways you want to encourage healthy reading habits beyond the school day.

Challenge #12: Map out 3-5 ways you want to encourage healthy habits beyond the school day. Make plans for how you will encourage wide, high volume reading inside and outside the classroom this year, encouraging students to set goals, make plans, reflect, and adjust. 

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“Good habits formed at youth make all the difference.”

-Aristotle

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How Does This Help Grow A Community of Readers?

An intentional focus on healthy habits is a commitment to empower students to take charge of their own reading lives, learning to make choices, design plans, and set goals that will help them develop and sustain a habit of joyful and purposeful reading throughout their lifetimes.

Challenge #11: Identify 3- 5 book finding strategies that are essential to teach.

Challenge #11: Identify 3- 5 book finding strategies that are essential for students in the ages and stages you work with. Map out a quick plan for how you you might model each of them for your students in the early days of the school year. 

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“If you don’t like to read, you haven’t found the right book.”   -JK Rowling

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How Does This Help Grow A Community of Readers?

To cultivate a thriving community of readers one of our first priorities is to nurture each readers ability to find one book after another.

Before readers can settle into engaged and purposeful reading, they must find their way to texts that they can and want to read.  When we commit to intentionally support book choice we are committing to helping readers learn to consistently find texts that lead to high levels of engagement. 

Challenge #9: Get organized for conferring.

Challenge #9: Get organized for conferring. Start out by treating yourself to a few new conferring materials that you’ll be excited to pick up and carry around every day of the school year. A colorful new clipboard? Some funky pens in your favorite colors, ink types, or styles? Perhaps some fun sticky notes to use as “leave behinds” with students. Then, organize your conferring materials in a place where they are easy to grab and go.

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                           “To make the most of every minute, you’ll want all your tools                                 and supplies at your fingertips and ready to go.”

-Yates and Nosek 

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How Does This Help Grow A Community of Readers?

Getting organized for conferring, means getting organized to take your teaching on move. It means keeping a few simple, but critical supplies organized and ready to grab at a moment’s notice, so that what you need is at your fingertips when you need it. 

This Week’s Quote, August 19, 2018

“When we publicly acknowledge and celebrate the work of one student, the whole community of readers benefits.” –page 60

If you want to read more, you can visit the Stenhouse website to order your own copy of our book, To Know and Nurture a Reader; Conferring with Confidence and Joy.  If you’d like to be part of the conversation, come on over and join our To Know and Nurture a Reader Facebook Group. If you want more content like this delivered right to your inbox, click the Follow button below and  you’ll never miss a post.

We’re so glad to have you with us on our learning journey.  – Kari & Christina

Challenge #7: Make a list of books you want to highlight through book talks in the first month of school.

Challenge #7: Make a list of books you want to highlight through book talks in the first month of school. Get yourself ready to offer a book talk or basket talk every day for the first few weeks of school week.  Of course you’ll adjust once you meet your students, but you can count on having a variety of readers and so you’ll want to be strategic in making sure you enthusiastically and systematically introduce a well rounded set of possibilities.

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“Strangers talking over piles of books do not remain strangers long.”

-Matthew Pearl

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How Does This Help Grow A Community of Readers?

Book talks are quick informal conversations about books, meant to spread the joy and enthusiasm that one reader has about a book with other readers in an attempt to persuade them to read the book as well. In other words, book talks are moments dedicated to spreading book love around a particular text, series, author, or even classroom book basket.

Challenge #3: Prepare displays, table baskets, book shelves, or stacks of enticing books.

Challenge #3: Prepare displays, table baskets, book shelves, or stacks of enticing books for every age and stage that you work with. The purpose of this challenge is to ensure that every child comes face to face with a tantalizing collection of books from the minute they enter your classroom.  One of our favorite ways to do this is to have table baskets of an inviting variety of books sitting out from the first moment of the first day.

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     “Although I enjoy digging through the library to help students find books, my aim is            to help them develop self-confidence in choosing books for themselves.”   

-Donalyn Miller, The Book Whisperer

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How Does This Help Grow A Community of Readers?

For many of our students, absolute free reign of the classroom library may be a bit overwhelming at first. Think about the last time you were at a restaurant with a massive menu- The Cheesecake Factory comes to mind. Their menu is over a dozen pages long! Choosing what to drink let alone an entire meal can be quite the task when presented with so many choices.

This Week’s Quote, August 5, 2018

“If we are serious about nurturing lifelong readers, we must take seriously the work of book choice.” -page 74

If you want to read more, you can visit the Stenhouse website to order your own copy of our book, To Know and Nurture a Reader; Conferring with Confidence and Joy.  If you’d like to be part of the conversation, come on over and join our To Know and Nurture a Reader Facebook Group. If you want more content like this delivered right to your inbox, click the Follow button below and  you’ll never miss a post.

We’re so glad to have you with us on our learning journey.  – Kari & Christina

Challenge #1: Make a pledge to nurture self-selected independent reading every day.

Today we share the first of our challenges to help you cultivate a community of readers before the school year even starts. We’re so glad you’ve decided to come along. 

Challenge #1: Make a pledge to nurture self-selected independent reading every day. Decide when independent reading will happen in your classroom every single day. Put this time on your schedule. Make a commitment to yourself to honor it every day as sacred and non negotiable.

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“A child sitting in a quiet room with a good book isn’t a flashy or marketable teaching method. It just happens to be the only way anyone ever became a reader.”   -Nancie Atwell

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How can this action help to grow a community of readers?

Commitments drive actions. A commitment to build a true community of readers begins with a commitment to make time for self-selected reading each and every day of the coming school year.