This Week’s Quote, July 22, 2018

“This fierce determination to notice what’s right, right now, before we set about with other teaching, helps our students move from, ‘Oh, no, here comes the teacher’ to ‘Oh, yes! It’s my turn to learn more about myself as a reader.’” – page 28

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

How’s it going?

This post is part of our ongoing series called Power Language for Conferring.  To learn more about the series and find a quick link to previous posts, please visit our Power Language page on this site.

Today’s power language for conferring: How’s it going?

This Week’s Quote, July 15, 2018

“Whether you’ve known a student for six minutes or six months, the goal of every conference is the same: you’re there to harness your curiosity in the service of better informed teaching decisions.”  –page16

 

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

What are you noticing?

This post is part of our ongoing series called Power Language for Conferring.  To learn more about the series and find a quick link to previous posts, please visit our Power Language page on this site.

Today’s power language for conferring: What are you noticing?

This Week’s Quote, July 8, 2018

“Every book choice tells a story, about both the reader and their book-finding skills.”  -page 76

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

This Week’s Quote, July 1, 2018

“At its best, conferring is the daily choice we make to give our wholehearted and undivided attention to one reader at a time, intentionally noticing, celebrating, and moving their reading life forward.”  -page 2

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

How did you choose this book?

This post is part of our ongoing series called Power Language for Conferring.  To learn more about the series and find a quick link to our previous posts, please visit the Power Language page on this site.

Today’s power language for conferring:  How did you choose this book?

May I join you?

At its simplest, a conference is a conversation between two people: a conversation aimed at understanding, affirming, and extending what students are doing in their learning lives. But what makes some of these conversations almost magical while others fall flat? We believe the magic is in the language we use. Strategic language choices allow us to initiate, expand and elevate conversations with our learners in purposeful ways. So, in each post of this new series – Power Language for Conferring – we offer ideas of language we wouldn’t want to be without as we work to know and nurture the readers beside us.

Since this is the opening post in the series we begin with our favorite opening question for conferring . . .

Today’s power language for conferring:  May I join you? 

Coming Full Circle: A Thank You Note

Although we both love steaks bloody rare, legs shaved daily, and time by the water, the bedrock foundation of our partnership is built on a shared passion for nurturing readers through independent reading.  Yet we didn’t discover this shared passion by working side by side or meeting at a conference. Instead, we first because acquainted 140 characters at a time on the #G2Great twitter chat.

Who knew that regularly liking someone else’s tweets and following their blog could lead to writing a book together? Not us! And yet, here we are. And we can’t quite imagine that it ever would have happened without the #G2Great chat.  

If you don’t know about this chat, you’re going to want to check it out. Founded on the tenets of Dr. Mary Howard’s book, Good to Great Teaching: Focusing on the Literacy Work that Matters, the #G2Great is co-moderated by Dr. Mary Howard, Jenn Hayhurst, Amy Brennan, and now Fran McVeigh. This incredible chat draws countless literacy educators across the globe and fosters thought provoking conversation, reflection, and professional learning, week in and week out. And while other chats come and go, #G2Great , now into it’s fourth year, just keeps getting better.   

Why Confer with Readers? 10 Compelling Reasons

Our wish for every reader is that they are supported by a teacher fiercely committed to conferring. Why this passionate commitment to conferring?  Today, we share ten of our favorite reasons.

We confer because we want to . . .

• KNOW readers.  We confer because there’s so much we want and need to know about what goes on in the heads and hearts of the young readers we care about. So, the first reason we confer is to better know each and every child as a reader and a person. Knowing who a reader is, what they love, what they hope for, and what gets in their way is the foundation on which we help students build sturdy, vibrant reading lives.  We show up first to learn and only later to teach, offering our wholehearted presence to one child at time, in a ways that say, “You’re important to me. Knowing all about you and your life as a reader will help me be the best possible teacher I can be for you.”

 

• NURTURE readers.  We confer because it is the truest way we know to meet the needs of each and every reader in our classrooms.  Because we are committed to helping students build reading lives that flourish and thrive in the classroom and beyond, we need to consistently peek in on them while they engage in self-directed reading. There we can pair what what we know about individual readers with what we know about how to nurture reading growth, moving each student forward with personalized, just-in-time, bite-sized nudges.  In a conference are both intentional and responsive, as we follow precisely where a single reader may lead. By doing so we say to readers  “As we talk and think together about how things are going for you as a reader, we can find ways to keep strengthening your reading skills, habits, and love of reading.”