Conference Paper

          The conference that I went to was the RIASCD Pre-Service Conference.  Personally I enjoyed it. There were two different meetings that I attended during the conference. The first one was called “Write to Learn” Strategies to Support Student Achievement, and the second was about Formative Assessment. Both of the meetings were very informative, but I preferred the first one over the second.  It seemed to me that the teacher in the first one was much more knowledgeable about her topic then the teacher in the second one.  The second one also seemed like it was more lecture based, and the first one had more activities that the teachers and future teachers could use.

            In Strategies to Support Student Achievement, some of the activities that we learned about were called one word strategy, which asked the students to write one word to describe an article or small passage. Then there was also the muddy moment technique, which has the students anonymously write down questions, or things that they don’t understand about the reading that they all did, onto a post-it and then they stick it on the board.  The teacher then grabs random questions and reads them outload one at a time, each time either asking other students to answer the question or she answers the question if none of the students volunteer. 

            The last strategy that we learned briefly was called the “stoplight”.  She couldn’t go over this one in great detail because we were running out of time, but what she did say about it did stay with me.  Near the end of the class you give the students different colored post-it notes and have the students write their names and write any question they have on the back, and then they stick it on the “stoplight”. Green meaning they understood the class, yellow means a little confused, and red means they didn’t get it at all.  I really like this because they allows the teacher to know how her or his students are understand when you are trying to teach them. It also allows you to have a clearer way of knowing if you as the teacher should revisit any particular area with your students.  Overall I really enjoyed this conference and I really feel like I learned a lot.