STUDENT CONFERENCES: AN OVERVIEW
Time. Conferences as short as five or ten minutes don’t allow much time for work to get done. Fifteen to twenty minutes seems like a minimal, but still effective, amount of time. Longer conferences are justified when the assignment is lengthier and/or more complex, or where a number of tasks are on the agenda (Williams, 1998, pp. 96-97). At the Writing Center, sessions are usually 30 minutes long but do run longer for long assignments.
Housekeeping. One school of thought about conferences believes they should be infrequent, in-office conferences (Donald Murray); another school believes conferences should be frequent, in-class conferences (Roger Garrison). Most instructors prefer the former; the latter usually works best with very heavy teaching loads and in community college settings (New St. Martin’s Guide to Teaching Writing, p. 54). Conferences are usually scheduled over two consecutive days, with quite a few more slots available than students. It’s best to hand around a sign-up sheet and urge students who have a lot to talk about to take two slots. E-lists or pop mail address book lists work well for reminding students of the conference schedule; it could also be posted on a course web site. Some teachers ask students to submit specific questions before a conference, to write a memo about their expectations for the conference, or to hand in a commentary on the process they went through in writing a paper.
Purpose. The most successful conferences are focused on a specific writing task with some kind of text from which to work. It is important that both teacher and student read the text fully. If at all possible, the teacher has read the text beforehand; if not, she/he assigns the student a task to do while she/he reads the paper (e.g., write out your thesis statement, brainstorm for additional sources, sketch the outline of the paper, etc.). According to the New St. Martin’s Guide to Teaching Writing, conferences are most successful when they have one of these purposes:
•	Discuss a plan or draft of a new assignment
•	Discuss global revisions of a draft in progress
•	Discuss progress on a long-term assignment, like a research paper
•	Discuss a writing process or strategy
•	Discuss persistent local problems like syntax, diction, sentence boundaries, etc.
Agenda. John Bean recommends focusing first on "higher-order" or "global" concerns (content, thesis, organization, argument) because "lower-order" or "local" problems may change after the bigger issues are addressed. Bean also recommends initially setting an agenda with the student, but teachers may want to have their own agenda prior to conferences (1996, pp. 226-227). Some teachers may lead into the conference by asking for the student’s assessment of elements of the class (perhaps even the assignment in question)—a formative evaluation which empowers the student and gives the instructor some feedback.
Roles. Most writers on student-teacher conferences agree that the teacher should serve as an aide, or coach, and draw ideas and answers out of the student with skilful questions. "If you can teach a student to use the conference as a chance to communicate with a supportive, informed reader, you will both relax a little and become two writers, or perhaps a writer and a writing coach, working together to push a draft forward and, ultimately, to improve the student’s overall writing and reading skills" (New St. Martin’s Guide to Teaching Writing, p. 58).
Strategies. 
•	General:
•	Approach the student’s text as a reader, not a writer or evaluator
•	Ask questions rather than make prescriptive judgments
•	React honestly as a reader to unclear or successful passages
•	Indicate areas of success as well as areas needing improvement
•	Let students do most of the talking
•	Keep questions open-ended 
•	At the planning or invention stage of a project:
•	Make an idea map for brainstorming
•	Have student do 5 minutes of freewriting or listing on the spot
•	Play devil’s advocate to deepen ideas
•	Use table of contents, indexes, online databases, LOC categories, etc. to break up a topic and to suggest additional substantiating material
•	Ask How Does Who Do What and Why (HDWDWW): create a matrix with a column for Who, a column for Does What, and a column for Why
•	Use matrices (double-entry tables work well for comparison papers) to break a topic down and list subpoints in the appropriate cells
•	When first confronting the assignment, have students circle the nouns (the topics) and the verbs (what tasks are expected)
•	At the first draft stage of a project: 
•	Have student identify the thesis statement (if appropriate) and "test" it against the last 1-2 paragraphs of the essay
•	Gloss each paragraph of the essay (a short phrase summarizing the main idea or the main purpose of the paragraph)
•	Outline, map, or draw a tree diagram of each paragraph to inductively discover the paper’s organization
•	Circle cues or signal words in the draft, words that indicate a shift in topic or a new subpoint in the argument (words like includes, example of, furthermore, in addition, next, later, similarly, but, on the other hand, because, therefore, finally, in conclusion)
•	Have student dramatize and test his/her thesis by asking what people, institutions, nations, etc. might do in a given situation related to the thesis
•	Have student read a passage aloud (or the instructor reads it) and ask the student to summarize it in her/his own words. Transcribe it, or have student transcribe it, and suggest that that version would work in the draft
•	Ask about transitions to get student to focus on the shape of his/her argument
•	At the last stages of a project:
•	Focus on one or two problematic paragraphs
•	Try minimal marking by checking lines with surface errors and get students to identify errors
•	Ask students to "sayback" confusing sentences
•	Ask the basic question: "Who does what to whom or what?"—in other words, who or what is the agent, what action is performed, and what is affected by the action?
•	Read a passage aloud or have student read the passage aloud; mark pauses to indicate needed or incorrect punctuation
•	Have students keep a double-entry error notebook, where their recurring grammatical/mechanical errors are listed in the left column, with "fixes" or explanations in the right column
Sources:
Bean, J. (1996). Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Connors, R., and Glenn, C. (1999). The New St. Martin’s Guide to Teaching Writing. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s.
Meyer, E., and Smith, L. (1987). The Practical Tutor. New York: Oxford University Press.
Williams, J. (1998). Preparing to Teach Writing: Research, Theory, and Practice. 2nd ed. Mayway, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.