Conferring with Readers: Supporting Each Student's Growth and Independence

A great reading conference only takes five minutes, but its impact can last a lifetime. That's because conferences are the critical, one-to-one teaching that forms the backbone of reading instruction. Conferring with Readers shows you how to confer well and demonstrates why a few moments with students every week can put them on the path to becoming better, more independent readers.

• research a student's use of skills through questions and observations
• compliment to support and build upon successes
• follow up on prior instruction for accountability and depth of understanding
• explain a reading strategy by providing an explicit purpose and context
• model the strategy to make the invisible brainwork of reading more visible
• guide a readerinpracticing the strategy
• link the strategy to independent reading.

• matching students to just-right books
• reinforcing students' strengths
• supporting students during whole-class studies
• helping students move from one reading level to the next
• holding students accountable for previous learning
• deepening students' conversations about books in order to deepen their thinking.

Gravity Goldberg is coauthor of the Heinemann title Conferring with Readers (2007). She is a full-time staff developer at the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project at Columbia University, where she consults with principals, coaches, and teachers in New York City and throughout the country. Gravity was a special educator and third-grade teacher in Boston and is currently a doctoral candidate at Teachers College, Columbia University, where she is also a part-time instructor in the preservice early childhood education department.

Jennifer Serravallo is the author of New York Times' bestseller The Reading Strategies Book as well as other popular Heinemann professional books, including The Writing Strategies Book. The new Strategies to Go: The Jennifer Serravallo Digital Companion brings the strategies book together with notetaking capabilities and more to extend strategy-driven, goal-based instruction further than ever. Jen's newest print titles are Teaching Writing in Small Groups (which includes selections transadaptated to Spanish); Understanding Texts & Readers; A Teacher's Guide to Reading Conferences; Connecting with Students Online; and the Spanish-language counterparts to her strategies books, El libro de estrategias de lectura and El libro de estrategias de escritura. She is also the author of Teaching Reading in Small Groups as well as The Literacy Teacher's Playbook, Grades K - 2 and Grades 3 - 6. Jen's Complete Comprehension: Fiction and Complete Comprehension: Nonfiction are assessment and teaching resources that expand upon the comprehension skill progressions from Understanding Texts & Readers and offer hundreds more strategies like those in The Reading Strategies Book. Additionally, Jen is the author of the On-Demand Courses Strategies in Action: Reading and Writing Methods and Content and Teaching Reading in Small Groups: Matching Methods to Purposes, where you can watch dozens of videos of Jen teaching in real classrooms and engage with other educators in a self-guided course. Jen is a member of Parents Magazine Board of Advisors for education and literacy. She began her career in education as a NYC public school teacher and later joined the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project at Columbia University. Through TCRWP, and now as an independent consultant, she has spent over a decade helping teachers across the country to create literacy classrooms where students are joyfully engaged and the instruction is meaningfully individualized to students' goals. Jen holds a BA from Vassar College and an MA from Teachers College, where she has also taught graduate and undergraduate classes. Learn more about Jen and her work at https://www.heinemann.com/jenniferserravallo/, on Twitter @jserravallo, on Instagram @jenniferserravallo, or by joining The Reading and Writing Strategies Facebook Community.