Called to Conferences (Lauren's I-Search Handout)

Primary Challenges of Instructor-Student Conferences

o Instructors are students’ evaluators and can never escape students’ reactions to that.
o Students and instructors face a collision of expectations about conferences’ realistic results.
o Students and instructors have different understandings of writing terminology used in conferences, and students rarely ask instructors to clarify or define unfamiliar terms.
o Conferences are a site of “presentational talk.” According to Erving Goffman’s theory of social behavior, all actors in a conference choose what to reveal and conceal about themselves based on what they perceive to be their expected roles.
o Students fear instructor questions that are perceived to have right/wrong answers.

Primary Opportunities of Instructor-Student Conferences

o Conferences allow us to get to know our students, to value them as students-as-travelers.
o When students talk first, we learn how savvy as writers they really are.
o Students in pairs often feel more comfortable than students in one-on-one instructor conferences.

Pair Conference Strengthening Strategies for Your WRIT 101 Class

…before conferences
o Lead an in-class discussion to help students develop realistic expectations for what a 20- or 30-minute pair conference can—and cannot—realistically accomplish.
o Offer a conference-related fastwrite prompt with follow-up small-group and large-group discussion: “In the ideal pair conference, the teacher would…; I, the writer, would…; my peer would…. The outcomes of the ideal pair conference on my draft would be…”
o Allow students to read and/or discuss each other’s complete essays before conferences by arriving to conferences 20 minutes early, emailing drafts to each other, or sharing via Google Docs. This pre-conference student collaboration could be mandatory or voluntary.

… during conferences
o Donald Murray’s “response theory of teaching”: The student is the first responder to her own writing; the instructor responds to her response. Very simply, the student talks first. Murray writes, “Shut up—it isn’t easy.”
o Help students identify one or two significant changes to make as the result of the conference: this helps everyone feel that the conference has been productive and helpful.
o As questions are necessary, ask open-ended, essay-specific questions that do not have right/wrong answers, e.g., “Which part of the essay was hardest to write? Why do you think that was?”. Provide open-ended observations, e.g., “I’m not sure I’m understanding the purpose of this paragraph…”
o Avoid prescriptive feedback like, “You should…” Use questions and observations to serve as a catalyst for further inquiry. As my student Lael wrote, “the ideal pair conference would…give me too many ideas.”