Audit Trail Beginnings

This first post marks the beginning of a long journey of conferencing with many successes and many frustrations. All of these entries will be on the same date because instead of doing blog posts over time I wrote out what I would type after each conference.

October 5, 2009
Today in class we completed a KWL chart, which helps us determine what it is that we know, what we want to know, and what we have learned about audit trails. Since we have not actually done any audit trails before, we obviously can't complete the third column of the chart about what we have learned. Instead, I will answer that question at the end of my audit trail!

The questions I ask in the "want to know" or middle column will serve as guiding questions for the rest of the audit trail, so I will refer back to these questions as time goes on. As the above sheet shows, my three questions I have are

1. How do you go about "fixing" whatever problem a student is struggling with?
2. How do you make the student feel comfortable and not nervous?
3. How do you choose one specific issue to work on in a conference if it seems like the student needs a lot of help?

Although I do not have an excessive amount of questions, I certainly feel incredibly nervous and completely unprepared for this. I'm not totally sure what I'll be doing or how exactly I'll be going about doing it, which is not something I'm used to doing during an assignment. I feel completely lost with this whole project, which Candace says is how I should feel. However, I know this whole process is going to be highly beneficial in the future because I need to come to terms now with the fact that I won't be able to plan everything from start to finish.

The student I chose to conference with is a wonderful girl who I'll refer to as "Kate" for the duration of the audit trail to protect her identity. To guide my kidwatching, I looked through the questions provided in Owocki and Goodman's book Kidwatching: Documenting Children's Literacy Development on pages 12 and 13. Such questions as "In which contexts does the child work alone; seem to prefer to work with others?", "When is the child successful in getting things done?", "When does the child seem confused?" and several others helped me know what to look for while observing her for my very first week of the audit trail. This is what I observed:

She is a very bright second grade student who loves to read and is in the uppermost group for her grade's leveled reading groups. From what I have observed, she is very respectful towards the teacher and her classmates and is excited about learning. During class she is always attentive and quiet when the teacher is talking to the class, plus she enjoys working with others in general but seems to prefer reading alone. Kate does not hesitate to ask questions when she is confused about what the teacher has assigned for the class and if still uncertain she will ask for clarification. I figure that she will be a challenge because there are always ways for a reader to improve their skills but sometimes those ways aren't as obvious, so I will have to learn to really be on the lookout for any possible areas of improvement.