Hows It Going A Practical Guide To Conferring With Student Writers

So You Want to Actually Confer With Students Instead of Marking Papers Until Your Eyes Bleed

The basic setup: sit down with a student writer for five to eight minutes, ask them what they are working on and what part of the piece they are most unsure about, and then talk through a single focused revision idea before moving on. That is it. That is the whole ritual. Nothing more elegant than that. You do not need rubrics, you do not need a laminated flowchart, you do not need to fill out conference logs in triplicate. You just need to be present, listen to the student, and point at one concrete thing they can change before they walk away. I learned this the hard way in 2014. I was teaching a college composition course that had forty-two students. I was reading drafts the old way, which meant grading every paper like it was the final version, circling commas, rewriting sentences in the margins, and coming home with thirty pages of red ink that I knew none of them would read. I spent twelve hours on those drafts. The students got them back three days later, glanced at the grade, and tossed them. I was burning myself out for exactly zero improvement in their writing. So I stopped. I started conferring instead, which cut my post-class work down to roughly forty-five minutes on the days I actually held conferences, and the papers improved noticeably more than they ever had when I was just annotating them from afar.

Hows It Going A Practical Guide To Conferring With Student Writers

The name itself is not some deep secret. It is the opening question you ask when a student sits down across from you. "How is it going?" is deliberate because it hands the student the microphone before you do. You are not there to deliver a verdict on their draft. You are there to find out what the writer is actually struggling with, because the writer usually knows where the piece is broken even if they cannot articulate it clearly yet. When you ask "how is it going," you get a response that is often much more honest than the response you get when you open with "Let me tell you what is wrong with this." You will hear things like "I don't know how to end this" or "My second paragraph feels like it is doing something different from the rest of the essay" or "I wrote this part but I don't really believe what I wrote." All of those are usable. All of those are gold. Here is how a typical conference runs. The student brings a draft, preferably in rough but legible form, and sits with you. You ask how it is going. They tell you the main problem area. You read that section together, not the whole draft, just the part they flagged. You point at one specific revision move they can make. Maybe it is "This paragraph needs a clearer topic sentence so the reader knows what argument this section is making." Maybe it is "You have three examples here but only one is really supporting your point, pick the strongest two." Maybe it is "Your conclusion just restates what you already said, try answering the question 'so what?'" You give them that one move. They do it right there at the table if they can. You move on to the next student. The most important part that people miss is the targeting. Beginners in conferencing tend to want to address everything they notice in a draft. They do not. You address one thing. If the student is working on thesis clarity, you do not also stop their comma splices. You stay on the strategic level. The reasoning is simple. A student can internalize one revision habit per conference. They cannot internalize six. Trying to fix six things in five minutes makes the conference a lecture, and the student learns nothing because they are just sitting there nodding while you talk at them. That is not a conference. That is a monologue with a student chair.

There is also a quiet truth about this process that is not discussed enough in methodology books. Conferencing assumes the student has brought a draft worth discussing. If the draft is blank, or if it is two paragraphs written at 11 PM the night before, the conference becomes something else entirely. In those cases, you shift from revision advice to process support. You ask why the draft is thin, you help them brainstorm or outline on the spot, you get them moving again. This distinction matters. You are not just fixing papers. You are diagnosing where the writing process is breaking down for that individual student. Sometimes the break is in the thinking. Sometimes it is in the organizing. Sometimes it is in the mechanical execution. Your conference should match the actual break. I had a student once who submitted a draft that was technically competent but emotionally flat, which is to say it had correct grammar and a clear structure but read like a manual for assembling furniture. I asked how it was going and he said "I don't know, it feels boring but I think it is fine." We read it together and I pointed out that he was summarizing sources instead of arguing with them. He had never considered that distinction. We spent five minutes turning three summary sentences into argumentative ones. He went back and rewrote the section. The paper improved dramatically. That is the conference model working as intended. One insight, applied, measurable change. Now, the limitations. I will not pretend this is a universal fix. Conferencing does not scale well past about twenty-five students unless you have teaching assistants or a very flexible schedule. I tried it with thirty-eight students and broke after three weeks because the math simply does not work. You also cannot conference effectively with students who refuse to engage. I have sat across from students who gave one-word answers the entire time, who did not bring their draft, who treated the conference like a performance they were obligated to attend. Those conferences are nearly useless, and you will feel it. In those cases, I switched to written feedback for a session or two, then reassessed whether the student needed a one-on-one check-in outside the scheduled conference time to understand what was expected. Not every student responds to the same format.

Another bottleneck is time pressure. If you are on a quarter system with heavy course loads, you might only get one round of conferences per semester, which means you are working with incomplete data about each student's growth. A better alternative, if you cannot do full conferences, is to replace them with peer conferences where trained students confer with each other using a structured checklist. It is not as effective as a real instructor conference, but it is closer to the ideal than having no feedback mechanism at all. I have run both models in different semesters and the data is clear: instructor-led conferences produce the largest gains, peer conferences produce moderate gains, and written margin comments without a conference component produce the smallest gains over the same time period. If you want to implement this, start by building conference time into your schedule so it is not an afterthought. Reserve fifteen-minute blocks or two class periods where students rotate through. Prepare a simple form that records the student's stated concern, the revision move you recommended, and the student's response. Keep it handwritten. Do not overcomplicate it. After the conference round, spend ten minutes reviewing your notes to see patterns across the class. If six students all struggled with thesis statements, you know you need to address that in the next full-class session. That is how you use conferencing data without drowning in paperwork.