Spring_2012_Hows_It_Going


 * [[image:http://images.betterworldbooks.com/032/How-s-It-Going-Anderson-Carl-9780325002248.jpg width="207" height="240"]] || ==How's It Going?==

Spring 2012
|| =Book Summary= How’s It Going by Carl Anderson is an effective strategy guide for teachers of any grade level working with a writing workshop style classroom. The book is written in a conversational style similar to that of Lucy Calkins and discusses what teachers can do to be better at not only holding conferences with their students, but making their students apart of the process and accountable for being productive while the teacher is holding conferences with other students. Anderson defines effective conferences as conversations that are dictated with purpose and have a clear structure. He gives examples of conference transcripts with elementary and middle school students that offer insight on how to apply his techniques so that you too can hold effective conversations with your students to progress their writing without doing it yourself or simply saying “this looks fine to me.” The book is organized into seven chapters that cover the following topics:
 * 1) Making conferences comfortable conversations
 * 2) What the teacher’s role is in the conference
 * 3) What the student’s role is in the conference
 * 4) Helping students learn from looking at authors’ work
 * 5) How to lead effective mini-lessons (the basic outline)
 * 6) Setting up what conferences should look like (where to sit, how to take records, etc)
 * 7) Classroom management of an organized writing workshop

Author Biography
 Carl Anderson is the lead developer at the Teacher’s College Reading and Writing Project at Columbia University.  He is a nationally recognized education consultant.Before working at the college, he taught elementary and middle school at The Bronx, Kentucky, and Illinois. Today, Carl works as a consultant in schools across the United States. He continues to spend most of his days in classrooms with teachers and students, where he concentrates on helping teachers learn to have effective writing conferences that change students’ lives as writers. Carl has a wife named Robin, and two children named Anzia and Haskell. He has been a fan of the Beetles and recent been converted to the Bob Dylan fandom. Carl Anderson also wrote a book called Assessing Writers. This book offers teachers smart-ready to use ideas for assessment. It offers practical methods about getting information about the writers in your classroom and how to create lessons that meet your student’s needs. He is currently has a new books series out called Strategic Writing Conferences: Smart Conversations That Move Young Writers Forwards Grades 3-6. It talks about over 100 key teaching points to use in conferencing