Ed Tech

The John Spencer Assessment Toolkit suggests implementing a five-minute conferencing system in the classroom. This allows teachers to have one-on-one time with each student at least once a week, ensuring that students feel seen and attended to. There are three types of conferences: advice, reflection, and assessment. The advice conference allows students to ask questions and receive guidance from the teacher. The reflection conference involves the teacher asking the student questions to encourage self-reflection, which is an important part of learning. The assessment conference helps ensure that students have mastery of the content by allowing them to assess themselves. Each conference has a different handout for the student. Overall, this approach helps teachers build a strong relationship with their students, encourages reflection, and provides support and encouragement in their learning. talking about the part four, the teacher assessment of the John Spencer Assessment Toolkit. I think it's really cool how it kind of mentions that you should establish like a five-minute conferencing system in your class and it really is a simple idea, it's just kind of like over the course of a lesson, it's finding five-minute fragments for one-on-one time with your students so that each week you can meet with every student at least once. I think this is really important because I feel like students, they need attention and they need to feel like they're seen and sometimes when you're in a decently big classroom, you can feel like the teacher doesn't see you and this is a good way to feel seen by the teacher. There are three different ways, three different types of conferences you can have. There's an advice conference, a reflection conference, and an assessment conference. I think it's cool because these all focus on different areas of learning. The advice conference is allowing the student to ask you questions while, like just to ask kind of like about what they're struggling with and then as the teacher you can give them advice and help them, just like giving the expertise that you have to encourage your students. And then the reflection conference is kind of the opposite of that. Instead of giving feedback to the student, you are allowing the student, you are asking the student questions and allowing them to reflect and reflection is a really important part of learning. It's just, that's just something that really like encourages and cements your learning. And so these conferences would be really helpful. And then the more that the year progresses, you can ask fewer follow-up questions and then they can like learn, like the more that they talk to you, the more they know how to reflect well on their own, which is really important. And then for the assessment conference, this is about just making sure that the students like have mastery of the content. So it's like allowing them to kind of assess themselves. And so there's like different handouts that can be used for this. And yeah, each conference has like a different handout that you're giving to the student. Yeah. And then, yeah. So I'm trying to think of any last thoughts. Basically, this just allows you to really get to know your students well and just help them to reflect and just give them encouragement through their learning.