A new book from Scholastic Professional is now available! In Radical Listening: Reading and Writing Conferences to Reach All Students, Dan Feigelson suggests classroom-ready strategies teachers can use right away to enrich and transform their 1:1 meetings with students. Using each child’s unique thinking as a starting point, Feigelson’s stepwise approach increases student engagement and agency, while simultaneously building critical thinking and introducing new skills.
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Radical Listening helps teachers of grades 2–8 learn to confer using an equity lens. Feigelson outlines four principles of active listening, and explains how these reading and writing conferences can increase students’ comprehension and help them better express themselves as writers. As importantly, they develop their own individual identities as readers, writers, and thinkers.
“There are books about writing conferences, and others about reading conferences. In the life of a classroom however, any teacher doing one is also doing the other,” says Feigelson. In Radical Listening, he not only provides frameworks for conducting reading and writing conferences separately, but also makes concrete suggestions for how teachers might connect the two.
Feigelson is a national and international literacy consultant and author. An early member of the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, he worked for decades as a teacher, staff developer, curriculum writer, principal and local superintendent in New York City, before branching out into the world of national and international schools. A frequent keynote speaker, he leads institutes, workshops, and lab-sites around the world on the subject of reading and writing.
In a few strategy-packed chapters, Feigelson reframes the typical, go-nowhere conference, showing teachers how to turn their one-on-one work with students into powerful assessment and growth opportunities. Practical resources are also included, such as sample conferences, if/then strategies, rubrics, tips, and record keeping forms for starting conferences and keeping them going.
“Dan understands that the most transformative and memorable moments in a classroom are not those when an educator is presenting to the whole class. They are the moments when an educator takes the time to see, to hear, and to teach an individual student,” says Cornelius Minor, a Brooklyn-based educator, author and advocate.
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