My students came to me from a context where conferences were the times in class when the teacher would give 1-1 feedback to them, i.e., the teacher would list a bunch of things that needed to change by the next conference. I found that they spent most of their Independent Writing Time waiting for a conference and felt they couldn’t move forward without me telling them what to do. They seemed to always be stuck and when their turn came for a conference, they were passive receivers, very rarely adding anything on their own, and mostly blank when I asked, “How’s it going?” or “What are your plans?”
Moreover, I was no longer energized by the conferences and was struggling to figure out how to encourage agency when I stumbled upon Inside Writing by Donald Graves and Penny Kittle. Starting on page 70, Graves and Kittle explain the purpose of a conference and how they demonstrate it to their students. The explanation embodies the same qualities that draw me to writing workshop time and again: extraordinary detail, an avoidance of any assumptions about what students know and can do, unhurried gentleness, and authentic demonstration.
Unfortunately, I had exactly one class, 15 minutes to be precise, to achieve this given the constraints of the school calendar. I borrowed some of the information in Inside Writing and made the following slides:
Surprisingly, this 15-minute investment changed how most students showed up to conferences. A few students took time to trust themselves but were encouraged and guided by their peers who were already doing it. Needless to say, it was also much, much easier for me to expect agency and ownership with the shared vocabulary and understanding this lesson had established.
If you haven’t already, this is your sign to read Inside Writing. And here are my slides in PDF and PPTX formats, if you’d like to use them.
How do you encourage ownership and agency in conferences? What roadblocks have you faced? Comment below or get in touch with me on Twitter @teachingtenets.
For more of my writing, visit my Substack: https://teachingtenets.substack.com/
-Aishwarya
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