Small Group Activity and Reflection Three Reading Conferences At the request of my cooperating teacher, my small group activity

involved conducting reading conferences during the first week of my IMB experience. This was to help her finish assessing students for report card evaluation. I asked the students to read aloud to me for a page or two to check fluency and what skills they used for tracking or phonics. Next I asked them to tell me about the movie they were seeing in their mind as they read (the concept they were learning). I wrote down what they said. Next I asked for them to make a prediction about the story line and wrote that down as well. The purpose of this activity was to assess the students on the concepts that they were learning and practicing which were envisioning, predicting, and inferring.

What do you think your students learned as a result of this activity? What evidence do you have of your students learning? o I think the students learned to verbalize the concepts that they are learning. Since this was more of an assessing activity, I was the one doing the learning more so than the students. The evidence I have is where I wrote down the students responses and recorded notes of their reading. This was turned into my cooperating teacher for her records.

Name at least 1 aspect of the activity that was successful. What caused it to be successful?

o I really enjoyed conferencing as a way of assessing. I think it is successful because I believe that I learned more about these students and their reading and comprehension of the taught concept in a 7minute conference than I would have if I would have given them worksheets over the course of a few days on the said concept. I see where this is a more effective way of assessing for the teacher to know where a student stands in the reading concepts taught. Name at least 1 aspect of the activity that was less successful. What caused it to be less successful? o This way of assessing the students and conferencing around the room is very time consuming. While I did learn a lot about a handful of students and their reading, there were also a lot of student I was not able to get to. It helped that there were three of us circling the room and conferencing, myself, the cooperating teacher and the teacher assistant. If it were just myself, it would take me a long time to assess the students and I may not be able to get to all of them by the time we move on to another reading concept. What changes might make this learning activity more successful? Why might these changes help improve the activity? o I think, for the purposes of a small group activity, I could have taken a short passage and gathered three or four students together. I could have had each student take turns reading, to check fluency, and then conferenced with them all together. We could have had a small group

discussion about envisioning, predicting, and inferring. It may have taken a shorter amount of time and I would have been able to assess more students in that shorter time frame.