A few notes on conferencing

As I read back through chapter seven “Don’t Fix My Story, Just Listen to Me” in Barry Lane’s After the End, I am reminded of what Sheryl Lain says about conferencing (and I think this applies to all learning). “The one who does the work is the one who learns.” This seems to me to be a large part of what Lane is advocating in the chapter. It is not our job to be “teacher correctors” but interested readers who ask thoughtful and specific questions about the writing. I think it is one of the lessons that I’m still trying to learn; sometimes, I don’t feel like I’m doing my job unless I comment all over student writing. Even if I’m commenting as an interested reader, sometimes all the comments and questions on the page can be overwhelming to students. And it also takes part of their opportunity to learn away as many students passively receive comments rather than viewing them as a dialogue.

Lane indicates that we should let our students control the direction of the conference. Obviously, as a composition teacher, I have a responsibility to the rest of the university(both the students and my colleagues)—and there are certain practices and genres I must expose my students to and have them practice. But within those parameters, I must remind myself, I should let the student speak to me about their concerns and what work they have done with revision. It is difficult, however, to get a college freshman to direct their own conference. It requires more work on their part (ah, there’s Lain again!), and most of them don’t want to do that work.

I’ve used a couple different strategies for getting students to take more ownership of their conferences. One is a conference memo—usually about half a hand-written page where they choose a few things in their draft they want to address in their conference. I’ve left it pretty open to them or asked them specific questions depending on the dynamic of the class. They write these in class before they turn in their drafts and then bring them to conference. Another strategy is the revision memo—they point out a few key revisions they’ve made, and talk about how it changed their essay. (Side-note: a key revision is one that deals with more than just fixing errors or editing). The students who take these memos seriously and write them thoughtfully—the quality of their conference (from both our perspectives) skyrockets!