Teacher Assessment "Podcast"-Mallory Cheek

The teacher uses conferences as a form of assessment. These conferences are spread throughout the week and last for five minutes. Different types of conferences, such as advice, reflection, and assessment, are used based on the student's needs. The teacher provides handouts for each type of conference to prepare the students. The reflection conferences focus on student autonomy and self-assessment. The teacher finds the conferences versatile and effective in building relationships with students. I liked the idea of the teacher conferences and how that is a form of assessment. He said he spread it across the week in five-minute conferences. I thought that was very helpful because there's different types of conferences that he does and it gives that student that one-on-one attention so that way you're building that relationship and you build that trust and you're also giving them exactly what they need so they know that they're on the same page. He said that he would do it like when the class is doing classwork and so there's kind of a buzz in the classroom and so there's not this pressure that everyone else is hearing what you're saying or anything, which I found just very thoughtful. He said there's three different types, advice conference, reflection conference, and assessment conference, and he uses these different types according to what they need. So the advice conference is about the skills that they are doing well at and the ones that they need to work a little bit more on. Reflection is more about the student talking. It starts out where he is asking them a lot of questions, but by the end of the semester or the year, the student just kind of pops in and says what they're going to say. It's very student-centered. I mean, they all are, but especially the reflection one is really in the student's hands, and the assessment one, it's not so much about reflection, it's more about the students assessing themselves and making sure it's a conversation between the student and the teacher about where they're at with standards specifically. Something I really liked about what he did was that there's like a table and like a rubric almost, a handout for each kind of conference that there is. So for an advice conference, there's like a handout for each student of like what they can expect going into this five-minute conference, and he also lets them know when they're going to have that conference so that way they're prepared for it, so they know ahead of time what kind of questions they're going to be being asked, what they're going to be talking about, and what they should expect from the conversation. What I really liked about the reflection conferences is that this is not a time for the teacher to give feedback, which I personally would find, I think, pretty difficult, but it increases like student autonomy, and they're able to identify and metacognitively think about their learning processes and identifying what they need to work on and what they've already done well at so they can move forward, and I thought the entire idea of these conferences just seems really unique, especially as he can alter it according to what kind of class it is, especially if it's like a semester class or one that is differentiated, so like having three students instead of like five, depending on what kind of class you're teaching and the age and whatever, just, yeah, very versatile, the framework of this kind of assessment, and it also is just, it's organic and leads to just good conversations and also reinforces that relationship that I think is just really important, so I would like to use this in my classroom someday.