Ever since I can remember I have done one-on-one reading and writing conferences with students. I like to think of these as “interviews” or “conversations”.
Recently I did reading interviews with my students to culminate our year of online learning.
I selected a fiction text on Epic and asked each child to read the first page aloud while I listened.
Afterwards I asked each student five open-ended questions: (1) What is this text about? (2) What did you notice? (3) What did you wonder? (4) Was this text just right, easy or challenging for you and why? (5) If you could, would you keep reading this story? Depending on students’ responses to these question prompts, I probed further.
I gathered a lot of anecdotal information from these interviews that I will be analyzing and thinking about as I tweak my one-on-one conferences for the fall.
Now, I’d like to invite you into this conversation. How do you conduct reading assessments? What questions do you ask or how do you initiate a conversation about a text? Leave a comment below and let’s talk.
Elisa Waingort 
Elisa, I really like your informal reading assessment as you can gather so much information about your readers. What I also thought about is that this can be used both in person and online. It was not easy assessing students’ reading ability and comprehension when they were off-campus. We used a program that was not so easy to analyse.
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Juliette, that is something I worry my board will soon be implementing, so I wanted to plan for something more holistic. This was my first attempt at having everyone reading the same text. I usually just work off whatever students are reading independently. I’m thinking of doing several different kinds of assessments in the fall so that I have a better picture of my students as readers and so that I am better prepared when I’m told I need to do the same assessment for each student. I want to collect my own data as well. Thanks for commenting.
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