Jaime S. Reflection (Graves Ch. 12-14)

I chose to reflect on Chapter 14 because I'm certain that I will be conferencing my students in the future and this chapter does a good job of answering some questions relating to conferencing. Most of the things mentioned in this chapter were things Greg already talked about in class. But I think it is still worth reading about again.

One of the questions I know will be useful is about what the other children should be doing during conferencing. Children interrupt teachers during conferencing for three common reasons. They don't realize the significance of what they are doing, what is expected of them from the teacher is unclear, and the terror of the blank page. At Kapalama, I've seen students interrupt teachers because of the first two reasons. Most of the times its because they were not paying attention to the teacher so when it was time for them to write, they weren't sure what they were supposed to do. One thing Greg mentioned that the book didn't was that during conferencing, we should situate ourselves so we're facing the class. That's a really good point, especially for the little ones. Another thing I learned from this chapter was that there will always be a few students who will not handle conferences well. As teachers, we shouldn't decide whether our conferences are successes or failures based on them. We should continue to work with the students who are benefiting from conferencing and for the students who aren't benefiting from it, we could always try a different approach.