Conference Strate
The challenge of conferences — the part of the work that makes it both stimulating and exhausting at times— is also what is supposed to make it so useful to our pedagogy. It offers tailored help to students with diverse learning needs. In meeting with dozens of students this past week, I worked with some who were approaching their essays as if they were dry exercise in data accumulation. More evidence for a simple, plausible claim can only be a good thing, they assumed. These students couldn’t imagine an essay that articulated acknowledged the complexity of their evidence without deploying structures that relegated complication or counter-argument to brief, subordinate clauses. In adjacent sessions, I met with students who had been thinking of writing as a project of discovery and intellectual development for many years. These students had their own learning needs, of course. They struggled to gauge what their audiences needed to know about their evidence in order to understand its relationship to their claims. Or, they simply couldn’t find a way to come to a thesis-level conclusion about the complex thinking they found compelling.
This is all to say that to offer a formula for running a conference is probably a doomed exercise in foolishness. So, I won’t try to give you a Method for Conferencing. At the same time, I don’t want to merely spin a string of proverbs from my relatively limited experience with episodic, individual instruction. Instead, I’m going to make a limited set of claims about what works best with conferencing, trusting that you’ll assume these ideas are provisional and that you’ll forgive me for basing these suggestions on experiences that have been shaped by the limitations of my own skills and temperament.
- Find a way be positive and/or descriptive. John Burt has advocated thinking of responding to student writing primarily a descriptive task. I’ve found that profoundly valuable. Don’t overwhelm your students with too much evaluation. Your job is not to defend a grade in these conferences, it’s to help them see how their essays could improve and to get them invested in the project of revision.
- Be wary of Socratic questioning. It’s wonderful to ask your students questions that challenge their thinking; it’s an indispensable technique, I think. But the conference will regularly seem like a brief journey in frustration for both you and the student if you’re so committed to this approach that you never tell your student what you think of their essay. It’s kind to them and beneficial for you in the long run if you offer limited suggestions along the lines of:
- I think you thesis should be more clearly motivated than it is right now. For example, you don’t seem to confront this complicating evidence...
- You essay’s structure is clear, but it would be stronger if it offered a greater sense of drama or development (the paragraph at the end of page 5, for example, seems to re-tread the same ground as a paragraph on page 2).
- Paragraphing is a bit of a problem in this draft. I’d like to see you focus on paragraph coherence for the revision (see the marginal notes on pages 3 and 5 for concrete examples).
Match these suggestions with a few brief discussions of precise examples from their essay. Help them see how the actual words on the page operate. When you do pose difficult questions, make sure you transition out of rich and productive questioning into concrete suggestions fairly quickly.
- Make structure a central task. It’s usually the case that students grasp the ideas you’re offering about what they could do to improve their essays in the abstract, but they run into trouble when they sit down to produce sentences and paragraphs. In some cases, they’ll have anticipated your concerns already. Offering a rough sketch of the outline of their paper as it is either by quickly recording the claims of each paragraph as you read or asking them to summarize the purpose of each paragraph during the conference is one useful step. Using 10 minutes of the conference to brainstorm a better essay structure can be even more valuable. The clarity a new outline offers about their direction often leaves them happy and
- Give your stolid students a boost. If you have students who respond to an initial question about how they plan to start revision, or about what they think their draft could improve on with silence or empty patter, ask them a question that you know they can answer. You can ask them to give you a paraphrase of your thesis claim without looking at their essay, for example.
- Don’t be afraid of modeling. We obviously don’t want to edit our students’ essays for them. If we give them too much guidance, they won’t cultivate their own resources; they’ll treat us as sources of truth and themselves as copyists. But I don’t think it’s bad to model brief phrases or sentences for your students. Seeing their thoughts translated into a stronger sentence that demonstrates the qualities you want them to strive for can help them learn the conventions of the rhetorical situation they find themselves in. I do this regularly under the following rules.
- I must limit it to 1-2 brief episodes in the essay (say two topic sentences or the thesis statement and a moment where a key concept is being explained).
- I never simply change their text (no track changes, even). Anything I write needs to be in a marginal comment or clearly separated from their text by some formatting device.
- I always tell them the sentence or phrase is a model or possibility rather than a solution or correction; I encourage them to manipulate it and revise it further or to eject it in favor of their own revision.
- I always take the time to explain why I think the phrase or sentence seems to meet a writing goal and to encourage them to focus on the goal rather than on this particular sentence.
- When I grade, I pay special attention to whether or not my phrases have been revised and whether or not the student has found ways to improve related moments in the essay on their own.
As always, remember that only the vaguest recommendations about pedagogy are universally applicable. You’ll have students who surprise you and challenge your thinking and your skill all the time. Do you best to keep whatever procedures you use adaptive, and make student feedback a part of your thinking about strategies whenever you can spare the time and energy.
Nick Van Kley (2013)