Writing Conferences

Music: Coldplay, "Parachutes"

Since I've started here at RWU, I've been conducting regular writing conferences with students from my expository writing classes. I have about 18-20 15-minute slots per week. I pass around a sign-up sheet each week and students can sign-up for a conference. Initially, I had asked that students come to (3) conferences per semester. But, as we've gotten into it, the conferences are all filling up each week with students and some students are already on their second conference and we're only just over a month into the school year.

I don't know of many places where writing conferences are a mandatory part of teaching first-year composition. They were at one other school at which I taught. This school had a unique take on the conference and they really put their money where their mouth was as far as the importance of writing conferences goes. The class itself met two times a week for 50 minutes (instead of 3). Then each student was required to attend one 15-minute writing conference per week. In this way, the program made a commitment to conferences by actually providing instructors and students one less class a week in exchange for a writing conference.

This was the most committed I have ever seen a writing program to writing conferences. I think that the problem with implementing official policies around writing policies is that anyone who has used writing conferences knows that they take time--a lot of time. They are labor intensive. This semester I have close to 40 students. That's a lot of conferences, but in terms of hours, it's about 4.5-5 per week. Here's the thing. Let's suppose I was to devote 4.5-5 hours a week to some form of work related to the teaching of writing--writing papers or conducting writing conferences. I would MUCH rather spend the time in conferences with students, talking about writing. I don't know, there's something isolating about sitting with a pile of 40 papers to read and comment on. This is not to say that I don't still comment on papers, but I do find that the more time I spend with students in conference, the less time I have to spend writing comments on their papers.

One of the tenets of writing instruction that I've always sort of held onto is the notion that writing teachers must intervene in the writing process while it's happening. This is the thing that writing conferences accomplish that I'm not sure other methods of feedback can accomplish: they allow me to talk to students about generating topics, about source material, about organization, abour claims and reasons, about sentence-level problems, about revision while these activities are taking place, instead of after students have generated the paper.

It's almost like you have to take the emphasis OFF the paper itself. I've thought of this a bit. There is this system out there about how the writing of papers works and I think to myself, because I think that this system is not effective for teaching writing, how can I interrupt the "dominant narrative" about how writing works in college classes (or any classes for that matter). I guess I would identify the "dominant narrative" in this way:

--Teacher creates intimidating assignment sheet with all of the requirements of the assignment.
--Teacher goes over assignment sheet with students in class and asks if anyone has questions.
--Students go home and fret about assignment for a while. (deadline is at some point out in the future)
--Teacher teaches his/her content and talks around the edges of the assignment, occasionally pointing out potential topics for the paper during discussions and lectures.
--Deadline approaches for paper.
--Students begin to have anxiety about deadline, some start drafting, looking for sources several days in advance of deadline. Many do not.
--Sometime around a day or so prior to deadline, students devote a LARGE chunk of time to work on the paper. This period is stressful and intense. Problems arise and some are resolved and others are not.
--Students hand in paper feeling an odd mix of feelings about the potential for success of their work.
--Teacher collects essays, takes them home and either looks forward to reading them or dreads reading them.
--Teacher finds time to sit down and go through papers, writes manic comments on papers, assigns letter grade with little rationale or explanation of grade at the end of paper.
--Teacher hands back paper to students and talks generally about the grades, etc.
--Students feel: relieved that they earned a higher grade than they expected, pleased that they got the grade they thought they deserved, cheated that they got a lower grade than they deserved.
--Class moves on to the next thing.

This is what I imagine the dominant narrative, or typical pattern to be. But I have no evidence for this. It's anecdotal based on years spent listening to students talk about their writing processes.

I wonder if this is how it does actually work. I wonder if I could get some of my students to describe, in bullets, as I have done, the process, as they understand or have experienced it. I guess what I'm wondering is if I'm "right" or even "close" in my imagined version above.

I have added a new feature to my writing conferences, totally spontaneously, this term--the email follow-up. I've got to remember to write a bit about this next time. In the meantime, I think I'll ask students to respond to my post in their posts to get feedback...