Conferences are a crucial component of E100, providing you an opportunity to get to know your students and speak with them about their work. You are expected to conference with each student at least twice over the course of the semester; these conferences are built into the model E100 calendar.

Preparing For, Carrying Out, And Following Up on Conferences

Adapted from the Writing Across the Curriculum Sourcebook, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Written by Brad Hughes.

Although you’re likely to find them time consuming and exhausting, the individual conferences you hold with your students will be time well spent: by talking directly with individual students about their writing, you can have a profound influence on how they interpret your assignments and your comments on their work, on how they approach a draft or a revision, on how motivated they are to write; and you’ll understand your students as writers and thinkers far better than you ever can from only seeing their written work. Remember that talking—about ideas, about drafts, about revisions—is an essential part of writing, and that conferences provide ideal opportunities for that talk.

You will, of course, adjust your conference strategies to suit the student you’re talking with, the purpose of the conference, and the time of the semester; but here are some general suggestions that may help you and your students make the most of conferences.

Before the Conference

Before your first round of conferences, talk in class and give students a brief handout about what to expect during the conferences. Spell out the logistics: where to meet you, how long the conferences will last, what to bring, what to prepare, how to reschedule. And briefly explain the purpose of the conferences and make some suggestions for how students can get the most from them. And remind students that conferences are a mandatory part of the course.

To help focus and establish agendas for conferences and to encourage students to think critically about their writing, consider having students write out some questions in advance.

• If the conference is to discuss a draft of a paper, ask students to submit questions with their drafts. These questions should be specific: not “What did you think of this paper?’ but ‘Do I stray from my main point in the long paragraph on page 3?’; or ‘What do you see as my main point?’ or ‘Should this closing story be my opening hook?’ Early in the semester, work with the class to generate a list of model questions, then hand out copies of the printed list.
• If the purpose of the conference is to review written comments you’ve made on previous papers and guide future progress, ask students to come prepared with specific questions about your previous comments—and tell them they’ll be in charge of setting the agenda.

During the Conference

At the beginning of each conference, work to establish rapport and to put students at ease (especially early in the semester) and be sure to set an agenda for the conference, one that’s realistic given the time you have. Be selective: a 15-minute conference goes by quickly, so there’s time to talk thoroughly about only a few writing issues.

During conferences, get students talking—generating ideas, articulating plans, experimenting with language, posing questions, responding critically to their own ideas and drafts. You may need to work to resist the urge to do all the talking, and because some students will be uncomfortable meeting with you individually, they’ll be glad to let you do all the talking.

• Learn to ask focused questions or make requests: e.g., “Tell me what you’re planning to write about.” “In what order?” “Tell me why.”
• Encourage students to ask you questions and be concerned if students aren’t asking any. Ask students to tell you how you can help them.

Keep the conference focused on what most needs work and on what’s appropriate for the writer at that stage of working on that particular paper. If, for example, a student needs to work on developing ideas more fully or on clarifying a main point, concentrate on that; don’t get sidetracked into talking extensively about problems with grammar or punctuation or word choice. It’s fine to say near the end of a conference that once she’s worked on these larger issues, the student will need to work carefully on catching and correcting sentence-level problems.

Listen carefully. Incorporate what students say in your advice and in your questions. Robert Connors and Cheryl Glenn explain some of the things we should listen for in conferences:

You respond fully and immediately, not only to what is on the page but to what isn’t on the page: intention, process, ideas for revision, and so forth . . . . Gradually, your students will begin to see you as an interested and knowledgeable reader rather than as a nitpicking critic or a grammar enforcer. When students accept you as a reader, their work is transformed from putting words on a page in order to fulfill the assignment to real communication. ^[1]

Encourage students to write down specifics that emerge from your conversation: ideas, plans for revisions, clarifications, rough thesis statements, outlines. You should be concerned if students aren’t writing anything down and you should prompt them to do so. Offer specific praise whenever you can and offer lots of encouragement—writers need it!

After the Conference

Require follow-up conferences for the few students who need more individual attention from you. Alternatively, refer students to the English 100 Tutorial Program if you feel they need an expert reader who isn’t their teacher.

After a round of conferences is over, spend a small amount of class time talking about them—asking students what was helpful about the conferences, sharing some students’ effective ideas and strategies with the whole class, explaining what you’ve discovered many students need explained, reflecting on what you learned from the conferences, asking students for suggestions for improving the next round of conferences.

Strategies for Efficient Conferencing

Adapted from Bean, John. Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom. San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 1996. 44-48.

How you conduct the conference depends on where the student is in the writing process. Some students need help at the very highest levels—finding a thesis and a basic plan for an argument. Others might have good overall plan but lots of confusing places along the way. In conducting a conference, you may wish to try some of the following strategies, tailored to each individual case.

If Ideas Are Thin:

• Make an idea map to brainstorm for more ideas.
• Play devil’s advocate to deepen and complicate the ideas.
• Help the writer add more examples, better details, more supporting data or arguments.

If the Reader Gets Lost:

• Have the student talk through the ideas to clear up confusing spots.
• Help the student sharpen the thesis by seeing it as the writer’s answer to a controversial or problematic question (get the student to articulate the question that the thesis “answers”).
• Make an outline or a tree diagram to help with organization.
• Help the writer clarify the focus by asking them to complete the following sentences about purpose:
  • “My purpose in this paper is…”
  • “My purpose in this section/paragraph is…”
  • “Before reading my paper, the reader will have this view of my topic; after reading
  • my paper, my reader will have this different view of my topic”
• Show the student where you get confused or “miscued” in reading the draft (“I started getting lost here because I couldn’t see why you were giving me this information,” or, “I thought you were going to say X, but then you said Y” ).
• Show the student how to write transitions between major sections or between paragraphs.

If You Can Understand the Sentences but Cannot See the Point:

• Help the writer articulate meaning by asking “so what” questions: “I can understand what you are saying here, but I don’t understand why you are saying it. I read all these facts, and I say, ‘So what?’ What do these facts have to do with your thesis?” (This helps the writer bring the point to the surface. You can then help the writer create topic sentences for paragraphs.)

Throughout the conference, try to make “readerly” rather than “writerly” comments—that is, describe your mental experience in trying to read the draft rather than telling the writer how to fix it. For example, say, “I had trouble seeing the point of this paragraph,” rather than, “Begin with a topic sentence.” This approach helps writers see that their purpose in revising is to make the reader’s job easier rather than to follow “English teacher rules.”