Initial Thoughts

I decided to focus on the use of peer conferencing in my classroom because I felt that it was a worthwhile practice as it demanded social interaction as well as academic challenge. Though I knew it was practice that I wanted to employ more frequently, I also felt that I needed to work on finding ways to utilize and teach it more effectively.

I felt that peer conferencing was a worthwhile practice because the students like working with one another. I felt that this practice pushed the children to think more deeply about the writing work that they were doing and assessing one another would help them to gain better insights into their writing as they would internalize the characteristics of good writing.

I didn't think that I was carrying out this practice in the best way as I didn't have solid evidence that the students' work was improving. I was only able to get a sense of how students were understanding their writing work through conversations that I had with them.

Going into this work I thought that I needed to improve the structures that would support this type of work. For instance, I thought that we would need to have the students use the rubrics that they created in their assessments. I also wanted to give them a place where they could write down the experience of the peer conference as well as the specific feedback they would share with their partner. I thought that I would need to think about giving more time to the students for this type of work. It was necessary to think about the structure of our day and plan for devoting more time to Writers' Workshop.

These were the aspects that I thought were missing our work during peer conferencing and I did what I could to begin to infuse these changes into our classroom experience.

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