Choose Writing Strategies for Students

How to choose writing strategies for students for inquiry conferences

Choosing the best writing strategies for students is not always easy to do. Especially, when you look at their writing piece and you see a whole lot of strategies they need now. How in the world, do you choose just ONE quickly?

Before I dive into how to choose the right writing skills for inquiry conferences, I want to make sure you know what they are and when you should use them. Inquiry conferences can fast track your success with Inquiry small groups.

What is an Inquiry conference?

An inquiry conference is an one-on-one meeting between you and a student where you establish a purpose for studying a mentor text or touchstone text. You guide the student’s observations of the text, point out what you want them to notice, guide them to name what they see, and/or guide their thinking about why the author chose to do it that way. You help the student see how they can apply this to their own writing. In this quick modeling video with my student Brook, I will show you what an inquiry conference could sound like.

When should you use an Inquiry conference?

An inquiry conference is meant to draw upon what the student has learned over a few days or weeks. The research involved highlights what the student has learned and helps them see what they may do to strengthen their work. Inquiry conferences end with the student making plans for what they will do next. If you want a FREE lesson plan template and note-taking form for inquiry conferences, here you go.

Choose Writing Strategies for Student By Identifying a Goal First.

In an inquiry conference you will need to come prepared with the writing strategy you are going to teach. This is a good time to analyze student data such as: your conference notes, student writing pieces, on-demand pre-assessments, or mini lesson notes. Then choose ONE goal to focus on in the inquiry conference.

To help me choose a goal for my inquiry conferences, I like to use Jennifer Serravallo’s Hierarchy of Goals for Writing from The Writing Strategies Book. Here’s what it looks like:

This list of goals can help you categorize and organize your thinking about writing habits and qualities of good writing. They are arranged in an intentional order: goals to focus on first are at the top and goals to address later are at the bottom. This makes it so much easier to focus on one thing at a time.

When you are analyzing your student’s writing piece and habits, look at the hierarchy from top to bottom. The first place you see an opportunity to support your student… IS the goal you can choose to focus on for some time. Now how do you know when it’s time to move on to the next goal?

Here’s what I do. When my student has learned a few strategies (2-3) toward that goal and have become independent in using them, I know it’s time to move to the next goal.

Here's one of my 2nd Grade narrative writing examples to show you how I choose a goal.

In the photo below, you will see a 2nd grade narrative writing piece about a family trip to Thor’s Well in Oregon. You will quickly see the teacher feedback I can give my student to lift the level of his narrative writing. Take a look below:

I bet you can see a whole lot of narrative writing strategies that this student of mine needs. For example:

There are a lot of spelling patterns he can learn.
His beginning is very, very short. I could teach him how to add in dialogue, action and even more about the setting.
His whole story is all on 1 page, so descriptive writing strategies could really help him here. I could teach him writing strategies for elaboration and details.
I don’t see any dialogue at all in his entire story. So that’s another thing I could teach.
His ending is just one sentence. So there’s some work we could do there too.

Okay… there are at least 5 writing strategies that I could teach my student. So where do I go from here? That’s where Jennifer Serravallo’s Hierarchy of Writing Goals is going to help me. The first goal on this hierarchy is COMPOSING WITH PICTURES.

What is the goal of composing with pictures?

According to Jennifer Serravallo, it is using pictures on their own or in conjunction with print to communicate meaning. Using pictures to plan before writing or to illustrate after writing. Here’s what you can look for in your student’s writing piece:

How pictures are used (to plan, to add more after writing, as stand-alone text without words)
Evidence of revision of pictures
Ability to connect pages
Amount of detail used in pictures
Whether pictures are readable to others

My student doesn’t have any pictures at all in his writing piece. So this is the goal I definitely need to focus on first. Now that I have the goal, the next step is to choose a skill and strategy within that goal to teach in my Inquiry conference…or really any conference or small group. This process works for both.

Use a learning progression to choose writing strategies for students.

Are you familiar with learning progressions already? Does your curriculum have some learning progressions in them that you can use? If not, have you tried creating your own?

Learning progressions can help you build on your students’ strengths by noticing within the goal what students can currently do AND you can look ahead on the progression to know what to teach next. Sounds pretty cool to me.

Just so you know, in Jennifer Serravallo’s book called Teaching Writing Small Groups, she provides several writing strategy PDF’s or what she likes to call- skill progressions for all the writing goals on the hierarchy. Now remember my student needs to focus on the goal of “Composing with Pictures”. So I took at look at that skill progression and the very first skill says:

“Writer draws something (and can talk about the drawing).”

Well…since he hasn’t drawn anything yet, I’m going to teach this skill first. As I move down the skill progression, it gets more and more sophisticated. I will take one step at a time until he has learned at least 2-3 strategies and can do them independently.

Be comfortable to assess and evaluate your student work.

In order to choose the right writing strategies and techniques, you will want to be comfortable in assessing and evaluating their writing pieces and habits. This will help you identify what each and every one of your students should focus on (the goal). When you are ready, you can use the learning progressions to monitor their progress towards these goals. This is your chance to teach and guide your students for sure. But it’s also a chance to check in and assess, so you can be ready to move them flexibly from 1 on 1 conferences to small groups and back again. Once this happens, you are responding and supporting ALL your students’ needs.

Let me know on Facebook how 1 on 1 conferences or small groups are going so far. And remember, my team and I will be over in our Literacy Teacher Greatness Community every week sharing FREE mini trainings, tools, and resources that you can use to help you choose the right goals & skills for your conferences and small groups. We want you to be able to meet ALL your students’ needs no matter what level they are. So hop on over into the group and introduce yourself. I would LOVE to meet you.

I'm Desirée McGee-Greene

I help literacy teachers & coaches use the best reading & writing conferring methods and strategies to reach ALL their students EVERY SINGLE WEEK.

You can get to know me a little better here.

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Hop on over to our Literacy Teacher Greatness Community because that's where I'll be and I want to be your coach & cheerleader every step of the way!

In this EDITABLE Adobe PDF, there are conference forms for 9 different types of conferences PLUS strategy trackers for partnerships, small groups, and a weekly conferring schedule template to help you balance 1-1 conferences and small group work.