Chapter 14, 15,&17: Conferencing, Sharing, and Assessment/Evaluation

 I think that the section about conferencing very interesting and important. I like how they let us know that sometimes conferencing can be really complicated and stressful. I have see this is my classroom already this semester and a little from my previous placements. My mentor teacher is a male from Porto Rico, so he speaks Spanish as well as English. This is a great thing because many of the students in my classroom are hispanic, so he is able to communicate not only with the students but also their parents or guardians. I consider myself to be outspoken and able to say what I am thinking. I do not think that conferencing with students, parents, or administrators will be a problem for me. Being able to sit in and listen to teachers, parents, and students have meeting about their work and behavior has helped me and shown me how it actually work and the things that may come up in the meeting. I think that knowing that Ray keeps her conferences a short as possible was a helpful tip to remember. In my mentor class, when we write, I feel like when I walk around and help students or read their work during writing workshop that I am getting to know the children on a personal level and getting to know them better. Being able to help the students on a one-on-one basis and communicating with each student individually makes such an impact on the students and their writings. The four components mentioned in the text are very important to know and follow.

Having the students talk during reading workshop about their work is something that every teacher should make sure that their students do. Ray thinks that this is also a very important thing to do. In my mentor classroom, there are not really and children that are not talkative or shy/embarrassed to speak out and voice their opinion or share with their classmates. Even though I am not shy at all and will talk to just about anyone about anything, I would sometimes get nervous or embarrassed when I used to be called on in class to answer a question. I would always be afraid that if i answered the question and it would be wrong, my classmates would make fun of me and laugh. I finally grew out of this and learned that if you don't step up and say what you are thinking, then you will never learn and more than likely someone else in the classroom is thinking the same thing as I was but they were also just afraid to speak up. Sometimes I like getting called on now and getting an answer incorrect because I learn from it and I will always remember the answer now that I got it wrong. It is a great thing to be able to speak my mind and being able to share with my classmates and I will encourage all future students to not be shy to speak up and making sure that they fell like it is okay to get something wrong and ask questions. NO one in the world is perfect and we all make mistakes sometimes.

Personally, I do not think that I will be very good when it comes to assessing my students. I think that it is going to be challenging to me to be able to assess students writing because writing is a personal opinion and my opinion may be different and I may not agree with the things that some of my students write about. I believe that we should not have to assess students and their writings but we should with their reading and reading comprehension. The is a right and wrong answer to something like this but not with a child's actual writing. I can see that its fair for deducting points from students work for sentence structure, spelling, or misusing of words and their content. If students always get punished for their writing and never getting positive feedback, then the students will eventually start getting worse while writing and not trying their hardest because they won't have anything positive to look forward too.