Each school year, I push myself to change or improve one thing about my practice. There’s a lot to be better at each year, and I’m always tinkering with small parts of my teaching, but I try to make my “one thing” something broad with high-impact. A couple years ago, for example, I focused on implementing weekly cogenerative dialogues. And last year, I put considerable effort into changing my classroom environment.
This year, my one thing is to hold one-on-one conferences with students during class.
To type that sentence gives me pause. In the past, planning instruction to build in time to meet with 25 individual students regularly seemed wild. Impossible even. Like any teacher, I know the value of connecting with my students one-on-one when it comes to student attitudes and outcomes. But fitting in time for 1-1 conferences is a huge mountain to climb. Every other teacher I speak to understands this.
While conferencing with students still seems aggressive, it doesn’t feel far-fetched to me this year. I’ve aged enough that the classroom blitz has slowed down enough to enable me to make time for this practice. It also helps that a few years ago an amazing colleague modeled 1-1 conferences for me. She wasn’t teaching math, but we shared a room, and I witnessed her magic. It blew my mind how she shared all these quiet moments with every student right in the middle of class. She made me a believer that these types of check-ins were possible.
I’m talking a big game, but there’s still a lot I’m unsure about with how my conferences will look. I don’t know! Some ideas:
- Each conference would occur during class and last no longer than five minutes. Because things happen, I need to be open to fitting in an occasional conference during a student’s lunch or free period.
- I will conference with every student, not just those who are struggling.
- I hope to meet with each student at least twice a marking period (our marking periods are six weeks long).
- I want to post the conference schedule in the room. Each student will be assigned a day of the week so they know their meeting time.
- Scribble a few notes during and after each conference to help document what we discuss and any next steps we agree upon.
- Come up with a catchy name for the conferences. “Pausing with Palacios” comes to mind.
My dream is that over time these conferences become essential to my classroom culture, similar to how cogens have. I hope they can support my students and help them build momentum throughout the year.
With any change, there will be sacrifices. By holding 1-1 conferences, I will undoubtedly be less present during whole class and small group instruction. I’ll somehow have to adjust my pedagogy to make up for that. Providing more scaffolds and relying more on students to lead will be a huge part of the work.
bp
lazy 0ch0 