Conferring: A Dialogic Teaching Practice from Literacy Block

“Talking in class.” For many adults, this charged phrase may conjure up memories of times when we were asked to be quiet in a classroom so that we (and others) could focus on our individual work. But at Long-View, as in many schools that lift up the practices of dialogic teaching and inquiry learning, “talking in class” – in larger group conversations, with partners, and between individual learners and teachers – is foundational to the way we learn. 

One place where this ethic manifests is in the way that Literacy teachers at Long-View most frequently give feedback: individual “conferences” between a learner and a teacher. Our reading and writing conferences aren’t a once-a-semester affair, but happen in the course of every day. These brief interactions provide timely, individualized, holistic feedback on what’s happening at a particular moment in a child’s reading or writing life – and do so, critically, in a way that permits the child to engage dialogically with that feedback in real time. 

An article on classroom talk from the academic journal Frontiers in Education describes current thinking on why it’s so crucial to give feedback within the context of an active exchange of ideas:  

“Effective feedback [happens within] a dialogic process involving both student and teacher, and it is essential that students understand the meaning of teachers' feedback and use that information to close the gap between what they know and what they are expected to know. Such a process needs to generate opportunities for students to actively participate in their own learning and to talk about their understanding of the work they have to do. The student must be able to comprehend, judge and act on the information given by the teacher.”

In the structure of Long-View’s Literacy Block, based closely on the pedagogical models of writing and reading workshop, learners spend the majority of their time actually reading and writing, rather than completing the typical “schoolwork” that so often surrounds these practices. Learners choose texts to read, as well as forms and content for writing, with a high degree of freedom, working within the boundaries of genre-based units of study developed by their teachers. Conferences occur during this dedicated reading and writing time, one-to-one, in the midst of the classroom. 

In the moments before a recent writing conference, a learner in Gold Band was sitting on one of the sofas with a classmate, and had just drafted a vivid, funny account of an argument between siblings while traveling. Noticing she had paused her furious typing and slowed her pace a bit, her teacher pulled up a chair beside her and asked to confer. 

In a conference such as this, the research phase comes first: the teacher and learner read the writing together. They may pause to name something remarkable as they read: “Oh, that’s so funny! You depict the mom’s frustration so clearly. I get it!” As they read together, the teacher thinks about goals for the writer. Where does she need to grow? What teaching point will resonate most strongly in this context? What will move her forward as a writer?

In this particular case, the teacher assessed that the writer was ready for a quick, focused lesson on dialogue format. Paragraph breaks would help the audience to distinguish between speakers and would enhance the humor and naturalism already present in the draft. After considering these ideas and still with the teacher beside her, the learner sifted through an exchange in her draft, sorting out who spoke where, and verbalizing her concept for the scene as she revised. This brief “oral revision work” served to help jump-start her, and then she continued working alone on more revisions. The whole conversation took less than five minutes, leaving room for Gold Band’s teacher to engage in more conferences with several other learners before the end of writing time.

Contrast this kind of feedback and instruction to a model in which there’s only time for one kind of lesson for the members of a given group, and where feedback might only come long after production, in the form of a paper returned with written comments. 

Anyone who has spent time at Long-View can tell you how much of the day hinges on conversation. It’s not just that we like to talk with each other (though that’s true), but we privilege talk because we know it’s indispensable to learning.