is that they represent a range of concerns that cover many aspects of seri-
ous professional development in the realm of teaching writing. In other
words, through collaborative assessment conferences, teachers are likely
to articulate issues and concerns that are both important to them and sig-
nificant to the field.
The first category encompasses questions about teaching, curricu-
lum, and assessment. In the conversation about “May Is,” for example,
participants talked at length about the relationship between the lack of
punctuation and the meaning communicated in the poem. This discus-
sion gave rise to questions about when and how to approach the problem
of teaching punctuation. Should Jessica’s poem be corrected for punctu-
ation? Can punctuation be discussed in the context of exploring what
meaning Jessica wants to communicate? What could Pam do to help Jes-
sica as a writer at this point? These kinds of questions may come up at
any time in the conference, but they are most likely to emerge during the
discussion of teaching moves. Other questions in this category explore the
relationship between the assignment and what the child hands in. In par-
ticular, these questions address how children make sense of teachers’
instructions and what kinds of assignments encourage creativity and
expressiveness.
The second category is questions about writing in particular genres.
Given the nature of the pieces we read, most of our questions centered
around story writing, poetry, and writing with illustrations. Through the
discussions of several poems, many questions emerged about the nature
of poetry. What makes a poem a poem? Can a piece of writing be a poem
simply because a child declares it to be a poem? These are obviously
important questions, and although there may be no absolute answers to
them, how deeply a teacher has considered them and their complexity
will have significance for how the teacher structures an assignment and
responds to students’ writings.
The final category of questions raised in these sessions concerned
children as writers and sought a developmental perspective. Here are
three of the many questions I noted from the 10 conferences:
- Do children imagine an audience when they are writing? If so,
what audiences do they imagine? Peers? Teachers? Parents? Others?
Wonder ing to Be Done 253