English 1550 (Thursday, Sept. 15)

Instead of holding class on Thursday, Karen devoted the day’s class time (plus additional time on Tuesday and Friday) to 10-minute student conferences. Her reason for holding the conferences was fairly simple but, I think, important. Karen said she just wanted to get to know her English 1550 students a little bit better and also address any issues early on in the course instead of waiting for these problems to show up in the next round of conferences (which occur later on in the semester). I observed two of the student conferences on Thursday, then was on my own for five of them. I was also responsible for meeting with a student on Friday morning. I wasn’t terribly intimidated by the idea of individually meeting with students, since it was similar to my work experience at the Writing Center. Modeling my conferences with students after Karen’s approach, I first asked the students about any concerns or questions they had thus far in the course. I devoted the rest of the conference time to talking about the first major assignment: a five-page essay describing the student’s current attitude about work and what influenced that attitude. A lot of students seemed slightly unclear about the assignment and weren’t sure if they had received it in an email or in class, or even if it was available on Blackboard. This could be because they didn’t really devote a lot of time to thinking about the essay before conferences (especially because the rough draft for peer review/workshopping isn’t due until Thursday). One thing that might help with this is passing out and discussing the actual assignment sheet in class. A lot of students also needed help narrowing down their topics, and I was surprised by how many of them needed me to almost pull the information out of them. I think that my journalism background will definitely be beneficial when it comes to holding conferences next semester for this reason.

COMMENTS:

* Guy Shebat: I agree with you that, in this case, a print-out of the assignment prompt would have helped a lot, particularly to assure that the students would be reasonably prepared for the conference. I am not a 'master conferencer' by any means, but I like to give the students a pre-conference assignment, so that they come prepared with something to discuss (in your case, I might have required them to come to the conference with some pre-writing for that first assignment).