Some Thoughts About Writing Conference Strategies
Because I first was trained to teach composition as a graduate student in the University of New Hampshire's program, I have long been a fan of conference-based writing instruction. Writing "classes" beg the question of whether writers really can learn as a "class" rather than in highly individualized ways better suited to the one-on-one conference. Later experimentation led me to try two-on-one or three-on-one conferencing to handle larger student loads in fewer conference times. There are clear limits and obvious trade-offs, but don't neglect what one student can learn from listening to another student's writing problems and solutions. Also, when you have a limited set of central issues to discuss with every student before the conference can begin, group conferences really reduce the sense of true deja vu that accompanies repeated one-on-one conferences. However, the latter are perhaps the most important, especially for freshmen writers for reasons I think are entirely understandable. In general, the older and more sophisticated your writers are, the more likely they'll be able to listen well and patiently enough to benefit from a group conference. It can work for freshmen if they're focused on a tight task as a group, kind of like a mini-class with greater opportunities for them to steer the teaching to what they most need, and for you to detect whether they're getting it or not.
There are two opposing models for one-on-one conference length and frequency. Don Murray and Les Fisher at UNH taught that the short, frequent conference was better than the long one which couldn't be reproduced very often without burning out the instructor and often degenerating into small talk not writing-related. They'd set them up for 5 to 10 minutes (a 10-minute window for everyone allows someone to check in and out quickly, giving you some recharge time). The frequency usually was every week or every other week. If you are a typical composition instructor with a two-course load of roughly 34 students, 340 minutes would be a long time to spend in addition to class time, but you can cancel one class meeting in a week to do it. If you're teaching TTh, that reduces the additional load by 90 minutes (roughly 4 hours?). If you're teaching MWF, cancel two classes to achieve roughly the same effect. Think of the class time as a kind of "bank" which you can draw on for serious structural improvements in their writing.
Short conferences require you to monitor their progress vigilantly. After the first awkward conference, your students will know what to expect. They show up and you ask them "how's the writing going?" If they don't respond coherently on their own, you quickly run down a quick list of questions. Have you focused your topic--what is it now? Have you got a thesis--what is it now? Who's your best reader for this paper and why do they need to hear it? Do you have any questions I can answer? End of session...or so the theory says. After a few of these, you can start shifting the questions to individual problems, teaching a little grammar on the fly, showing them what a hanging indent is and why MLA likes them, etc. Revision strategies would predominate in the end-of-process conferences.
The other school says sit them down and develop a real conversation about their writing processes, their thoughts about the topic, their concerns about what you want, etc. That usually takes 20-30 minutes, and even at 20 it's impractical for a double section load unless you've got no other responsibilities (e.g., courses elsewhere). The big advantage is that they can better construct their imagination of you as an audience for their work and play with strategies for inventing an academic voice for themselves if you have a real conversation that can risk wandering a bit. You also can learn things that can help you understand what forces have made them into the writer you see before you. If you could do this at the start of the semester, it might create enough positive impact that you might not have to repeat it, or might only want to meet once more with them (maybe when they're working on their last assignments and you have no more class preparation to pre-occupy you). You can increase the precision of your understanding of their past writing experience if you ask them to write a short diagnostic essay in the first week of class, telling you what they think and feel about writing, how their writing has been received by their instructors, and what they think they still need to improve about their writing. This sends a strong message in non-composition-program courses that your course cares about writing quality which can make it easier to you to reinforce that lesson when paper assignments are given out. In comp. courses it also provides you with an excellent pre-course document to compare with a post-course self-evaluation collected at the end of the semester, perhaps the only valid "course evaluation" for a writing teacher.
For freshmen, who think the teacher's office is like the principal's office, it's really important to do some kind of conference early, even if only the 5-10 minute one. I like the end-of-semester conference because you can come to agreements about what has improved and what they still have time to work on, as well as what they'll have to really work on next semester. It also humanizes the evaluation process at a time when they're anxious about grades.
The conferences at UNH really were a revelation to me in that they reminded me what it was like "not to know how to write for college" in a more complex and sympathetic fashion than I'd imagined before. The students also really responded well to being treated like adults with important projects on their hands. The further we are from our freshest memories of language acquisition, the more difficult become our attempts to help those in the midst of the process. For some important research that may help you recover some of this knowledge, check the English 221 web syllabus, especially the articles by Robert Graves on seven-year-olds' composing processes, Sondra Perl's on characteristics commonly found in successful and unsuccessful college writers' strategies, and Lucille McCarthy's report on a typical sophomore's complex and conflicting array of writing tasks and standards. We write as well as we do because we have internalized and forgotten many of the mental struggles necessary to acquire our skills. Our students write as they do because they are fully immersed in those struggles, in the forefront of the battle rather than back at Central Command. The conference allows both of us to deal with those facts.
--Arnie Sanders, 9/18/01