Effective student conferences don't happen spontaneously. We've looked at some of the things that teachers can do to work toward effective conferencing, but students have a role in this practice as well. We're going to look at some of the roles that students can play in conferencing. Much of the information in this particular video comes from Carl Anderson's book, How's It Going? A Practical Guide to Conferring with Student Writers. The best way to ensure that you and your students have successful conferences is to help students understand what their role is in a student conference. Anderson recounts his very first student conferences in which he focused on telling the student all the things that she should do to improve her paper. Anderson wrote, "I knew that I was taking control of my students' writing, but I felt I had no choice because they wouldn't or couldn't talk with me." He has many of the teachers he worked with express the same frustration with the passive role their students play in conference. Over time Anderson learned that most students didn't speak up in conference because they had never participated in steering conferences before, and had little to no idea how to talk about their own writing. Or if they had been in conferences before, it may well have been like the ones that I mentioned overhearing in the previous video where the only voice I heard over 20 or 30 minutes of conferencing was the teachers. The solution was to teach students how to take an active role in conferencing. He divides conferencing into two parts. In the first part of the conference, he suggests that the students set the agenda by describing their writing work, and that the student respond to the teacher's questions by describing their writing work more deeply. To start with, students are setting the agenda because in open-ended questions such as, what are you working on or how can I help you today, allows the student then to respond and to set the agenda by describing what they're doing, describing what help they think they might need. Reluctant writers particularly may say a little bit less than you would like in this initial description, and so as the teacher you want to push a little bit more deeply into your questions. Ask follow-up questions, try to bring out more of what they're thinking about their own work. Then in the second half of the conference, as a student, listen carefully to your teacher's feedback and teaching. Ask questions to clarify and deepen your understanding of what the teacher is teaching. Have a go with what your teacher taught you and commit to trying what your teacher taught you after the conference. We talked it in the previous video about selecting one technique or strategy to teach in a writing conference after you've spoken with the student and after you've looked at the student's work and considered what kind of conference it might be. Once you start teaching the role of the student is to listen, but also to ask questions. If the student doesn't understand what you're talking about or isn't sure, or just has some questions, draw out those questions, and then have the students try it out. Whatever you're teaching, let them take a stab at it while you're still there and you can look at what they're doing, you can help them even more as that's happening. Then ask students to continue to commit to this particular technique, to try it even after the conference has ended. Again, one of those roles that students can fulfill is to commit to trying what you just taught them. Now for the teacher, there are some techniques that you can use that can be helpful throughout, and one is to model talking about your own writing. If students struggle with not knowing how to talk about their writing, you can show them by talking about your own. For example, you might say, "I want to show you today how I got started with the first draft of my memoir about my father. In my writer's notebook, I brainstormed a couple of possible leads then I pick the one that made me really want to write. I'll show you my work so you can get a clear picture of what I did." Simple modeling, but again, it says to the students, this is how you begin to talk about the process of writing that you are following. You can also use mini-lessons to teach how writers talk about writing. Perhaps the simplest way for us to teach students about conferencing is for us to initiate whole-class discussions about the subject. As students share their thoughts we can assess their understanding of why we confer with them and the roles of teacher and student in the conversation, then we know what to teach them. We've talked about using low-risk writing as a way to start a discussion, and this could be one way to do that. Have students start by just jotting down for two or three minutes everything that comes to mind when you say student conference, or everything that they think about or know about a student conference. What kind of experiences that they've had, how they feel when they are told we are going to have student conferences. That's one way. Then to have that discussion as a full class is one way to initiate the whole idea of what is a conference. You can also model student conferences in a fishbowl technique. We can confer with the child while the rest of the class observes, and they can take notes about what they noticed the teacher and student doing in the conference. I've done this type of fishbowl modeling with individual one on one conferences, but I've also used them with peer response groups, which can be a lot of fun. I model bad conferences and bad peer response groups as well as good ones. For a peer response group, for instance, you have to collect the students in advance and talk to them, and set them up. It helps if some of your students have acting aspirations. But I tell students in advance that I wanted them to pretend to behave in a certain way that would imitate a bad peer response group and then I assigned roles. One student was the apologetic writer, the person who goes, oh, I know this is terrible, I'm sorry, you have to read it, you don't have to pay any attention to it. It's horrible, it'll never be any good. Another student was the social butterfly, who didn't really care about talking about the writing but was more interested in who was dating who, and what was happening on Saturday night. We had the nitpicker, who was somebody who constantly looked at individual words even in an early draft and was trying to rewrite every sentence. We have the, everything is wonderful student, who simply said whenever their turn came up, "This is terrific. I wouldn't change a word, it's perfect, it's wonderful. I have no suggestions for improving it and can't be improved." I did this to have fun with it so that students could see not just a modeling of a good conference, but a poor one as well, which also gave them a lighthearted way to call others out when the peer response groups were actually meeting, where somebody could say, are you being the social butterfly today and immediately that's saying to that student, we need to do this better. You can model particularly with conferences, really good conferences, but you can also model a bad conference just as a way of helping students to see these are the things that you don't want to do. If you catch yourself doing them, try something else.
