Planning

Planning is essential when utilizing peer conferencing in the classroom. As I begin to map out where and when we are going peer conference I ask myself how I want to institute the practice in the classroom. What are we using it for? What are our goals? How much time do we need?

In planning for the use of peer conferencing I either use mini-lessons to explain the idea or I model, outright, what the students will be expected to do that day. After reflecting upon the use of peer conferencing in the classroom I have found that it is necessary to model practices from the very basic to the highly sophisticated. For example, we must know how to talk and listen to one another before we can start to conference about our writing. These practices of discussion and listening have to be modeled and “tried out” before students can enter into a discussion of their own. This was a piece of my teaching that I had neglected in the past. I took these skills for granted, assuming that the students already understood the basics of converations. I have found that explicitly modeling a practice is something that I must include in the teaching of peer conferencing in the future in order to make it a more effective practice.

Once we have the basics, we can start to apply different layers to the peer conference. These layers might include an in-depth lesson about specific punctuation, characterization, story elements, editing practices, you name it. I mostly use peer conferencing to help students get to be better writers. I have found it necessary to discuss the characteristics of each piece of writing before the students can effectively talk about the material. We generate rubrics based on these characteristics that help us to assess our writing. For example, in a friendly letter we need to make sure that we have a heading, body, closing, etc. This sets up a list of criteria that we can use to assess on another’s work. Through the generation of these rubrics and guidelines we have create an understanding of what we will look for in one another’s piece.

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