The Brown Bag Teacher

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Conferring using Survey Monkey: Reading in the Wild, Ch. 3

This post marks the third week of our Reading in the Wild summer book study. If you are just joining us and missed the first week (Wild Readers Dedicate Time to Read), second week (Creating a Workshop Schedule that Works for You), third week (Building an Excitement for Reading), or 4th week (Curating a Classroom Library) make sure to check them out!
Conferring with Readers
Our hosts for this week’s study are Jennifer from Teaching to Inspire 5th, Sara from Miss V’s Busy Bees, and Alyssa from Teaching in the Fast Lane.

In Reading in the Wild, Chapter 3: Wild Readers Share Books and Reading with Other Readers & Conferring: What’s the Point?, Donalyn Miller shares about fostering a community of readers in the classroom, avenues for sharing books, and spends a considerable time talking about online reading communities such as Twitter, Nerdy Book Club, and Good Reads. (Please help me! I have no knowledge of online reading communities!?! Where do I learn? What are your favorites? Do your students participate in these? How? When? #solostsoconfused #noidea)

In Week 3 (Building an Excitement for Reading), I talked a lot about ways I build a community in my reading classroom. From Augmented Reality to book tournaments, building and fostering reading community is one of my favorite things to do. Therefore, today I wanted to focus on Miller’s last section of Chapter 3 – Conferring: What’s the Point?.

In this section, Miller relates conferring to building a relationship with a reader. She describes it less about data and more about connection. I really appreciate this sentiment. As we build relationships with our students/readers and invest in their growth, they feel respected. We can then use this relationship to set goals and have real conversations about their reading. When students feel safe, we get a true understanding of their strengths and areas of growth. Students are willing to share these because they know we (as teachers) will work tirelessly to help them move forward. With conferring relationships, students know we care.

This year conferring is not something I did as well as I should have. With 30 students in a class and 50 minute class periods (excuses, excuses – I know!), I found I was able to meet with students every 2 weeks. If I grabbed students before and after school, and in hallway transitions, I could often fit in an informal meeting on the weeks we didn’t meet during our reading period. My conferring with students typically lasted 3-5 minutes, sometimes less, took place on the floor, in the student’s favorite reading spot.

At the beginning of the year, the most burdensome part of conferring was the data. How do I record what I am hearing and what do I do with it? To streamline the paper and note-taking process with my 90 readers, I created a survey using Survey Monkey. When I conferred with students, I brought my iPad and completed the survey after I met with students. I never wanted students to feel that they didn’t have my full attention during our book talks, so I would take 30 seconds or so to fill our the form after we finished. Sometimes I would be able to answer every question, sometimes I wouldn’t. It all depended on the student, what they were reading, and his/her needs.

All of the results of my Survey Monkey fed into an Excel document, so I was able to sort and print the notes at the end of each week. From there, I could include the notes in my data binder from which I could pull during ARCs, parent meetings, or when lesson planning. (Note – Survey Monkey only allows you to store data up to 100 respondents, so I did purchase a subscription.)

For easy-access to the survey, I saved it as an icon on my iPad’s home screen. This made it simple to pull up the survey and ensures I do not have to saw an Internet URL or search the web for every conference. If you’re not sure how to turn a URL into an iPad icon, check out my picture tutorial here.

 

Once I found a method for conferring with students and recording notes, I found myself more motivated to find time to confer. Being an organizationally-minded person, the Survey Monkey helped me focus my thoughts and focus my attention on the students (not note-taking) during our conferences together. I really like Miller’s suggestion of recording the conferences and listening to the footage later, but honestly, that’s SUPER hard-core, and I am not that advanced in my conferring…yet!My take-aways from this chapter:

  • Figure out the who/what/when/where/why of online reading communities (HELP!)
  • Find a spot for a Reading Graffiti Wall in my new classroom. So. Cool.
  • I must be more consistent in my conferring, and I must remember conferring is more about building a relationship than collecting data.

So, please tell me, are you a part of an online reading community? How do you introduce your students to online reading communities? Do you find it difficult to carve out time for conferring? What tips/tricks do you have for me and other teachers? We want to hear your advice, thoughts, and ideas for the classroom, too. The more teachers we have joining, the more amazing our classrooms will be this fall!

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Comments

  1. Kim Collazo says

    July 17, 2014 at 1:22 pm

    Hi Catherine! I loved this blog post! I have also read Donalyn Miller's books and they changed the way I taught reading dramatically! I still struggle with what data to collect during my conferences, and love the idea of the "after survey"! I think I may use Google forms since it's free, but love the short template you created. Thank you for sharing. I am very interested in my kids having some online discussions about the books they are reading with new friends outside our classroom. I envisioned setting up some Edmodo groups and providing some weekly guiding prompts, but letting the majority of the discussions come from the kids' interactions. If you would be interested in that please let me know. We are a fifth grade class in NC.

    Thanks again for sharing!

    Kim
    Collazo Cove

    Reply

    • Carrie Garrison says

      July 17, 2014 at 3:28 pm

      Hi Kim! I am also a 5th grade teacher (Phoenix, Arizona) planning to use Edmodo for the first time and would love to maybe connect our students together. Just let me know! TeacherCarrieAZ at gmail dot com
      being-ladylike.blogspot.com

      Reply

    • Kate says

      July 19, 2014 at 12:12 am

      Hi Kim! That sounds like a wonderful idea. I would love to use Google forms since it's free but our District blocks all the Google Applications – Drive, email, forms, etc. It's SO frustrating. Thanks so much for stopping by. 🙂

      Reply

  3. Carrie Garrison says

    July 17, 2014 at 3:36 pm

    I love the idea of using Survey Monkey! I definitely also like how Donalyn uses Dragon Dictation to record her conferences. So, I might do that as well as use Survey Monkey after the conference. I have been involved in the online community Donalyn mentioned on Twitter in the past, but got incredibly busy with National Boards the last 2 years. But I can tell you it is awesome! Most of the new books I bought for my library were highly recommended by the Twitterverse at #titletalk as well as by Donalyn and John. Goodreads is the social network that I think I am way more addicted to than Facebook for sure. When I first joined, I had trouble finding a book to read next…I would just go to Barnes and Noble and wander till a book caught my eye. But now…I have something like 300 to-reads on my shelf! I follow Donalyn, John, and many others from the Twitter community and always find out about new books their students are loving. It's fantastic! One of these days I'd love to become a participating member again. For now, I am going to use Edmodo to have my students create a type of online community and see where that takes us this year. I used to have my students signed up for Goodreads (b/c we had school email accounts) and they shared books that way and after they left me. But that has dissipated. 🙁
    being-ladylike.blogspot.com

    Reply

  4. Rachelle says

    July 17, 2014 at 4:41 pm

    I would second the goodreads recommendation! I use it to keep track of and find recommendations for personal/fun reading more than professional, but I'll have to start using it to find good children's books now, too.

    Reply

  7. Beth says

    July 18, 2014 at 2:40 am

    Thanks for sharing your success using Survey Monkey for conferring. I´ve been thinking that electronic records would help me a lot to improve my conferring, and you´ve confirmed that.

    Also, thanks for asking about online reading communities. I´ve been logging my books read on Goodreads for a couple of years now and LOVE it. No more writing down book recommendations on a scrap of paper and losing them; instead I just add it to my to-read list in Goodreads. I can always look it up on my phone – even while I'm standing in the bookstore. I also love seeing what others are reading and how they rate books. I don't review every book I read, but I do write reviews occasionally (like I would want students to do). I have had middle school students use Goodreads and my own children use it, but for this year with my 4th graders, I'm thinking of having them use Biblionasium. It's a site similar to Goodreads, but designed for kids. It even has a parent involvement component. Okay, I went on and on. I guess I need to write my own blog post. 🙂

    Anyway, thanks for your post.

    Reply

  9. Abby says

    July 19, 2014 at 4:40 am

    Hi Catherine!

    This is seriously super-genius. I love that I can do this as a small group teacher as well! I can build the spreadsheet and share it with my teachers. They will LOVE me… and I will send them all to your blog! 🙂

    Thanks!!

    Abby
    Third Grade Bookworm

    Reply

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