Conferencing with Students
by Dr. Cynthia Haynes

It is important to hold regular office hours so that your students may come see you for assistance with an assignment or to ask questions. Be sure to list your office hours on your syllabus and keep to them. If for any reason you cannot be in your office during the stated times, let your students know in advance if possible.

Students should also be able to make an appointment with you at a time outside your normal office hours, in case your hours are in conflict with their schedule. So you need to list your hours on your syllabus as well as say, "and by appointment."

It is important to keep your office door open during a student conference. You do not have to keep the door wide open, but try to strike a balance between privacy and accessibility. It is in both you and your student's best interests to keep the door open.

Be sure to let students know that anytime they come to conference with you about an assignment, they need to bring all materials that can assist them so that they make the most productive use of their time and yours. This might include their textbook, their handbook, copies of their paper, or whatever else might be involved.

If a student needs help with their writing, first determine at what stage in the process they are.

• If they are having difficulty with deciding on a topic, help them learn how to brainstorm ideas. Go over invention methods with them and help them identify specific invention techniques that work with their style of thinking and writing.
• If they have written a first draft, ask them to bring it to the conference, but do not read it until you have heard the student talk about the paper. Ask them to explain what they need help with specifically.
• Ask them to explain what their paper is about. Ask them what their main argument/claim/thesis is in the paper. Ask them to explain what evidence they use to support their thesis. And ask them what conclusions they reach.

The key here is that if a student cannot talk about their paper without referring to their specific written words, it is possible that they are not ‘in control’ of their paper yet. Reading and ‘correcting’ a paper at this stage is unadvisable and an unproductive use of the conference time. Since revision and further drafting may be necessary at this stage, correcting the prose as it exists may mean you end up correcting text that is going to be deleted anyway.

When you do read a student's paper draft during a conference, read it with the student beside you so that if you need to stop and discuss a passage, or if you have a question, then the student is right there on the page with you.

• Try to refrain from writing on the paper yourself, especially providing text yourself. You might try making a check mark beside a sentence and say "there is a problem here, can you tell me what it is?" Then turn the paper toward them and ask them to make the change.
• If you need to model for the student how to recognize errors in the beginning of the semester, this is a good idea (especially for students for whom English is a second language). But couple this with showing the student where to look in their textbook and handbook resources for answers to the problem.
• After modeling how to recognize and correct mistakes, ask the student to find subsequent mistakes and revise accordingly.

If a student does start talking in answer to questions you put to them about the paper, and if what they are saying is not reflected in the draft before you, ask them to write down these ideas right then so they don't lose them. It is important to show students how talking through their ideas is a valuable invention method, and it is important to record those ideas for later use.

Be sure that students know that you are not "evaluating" their writing during a conference on early drafts of a paper. This means you should learn to read student writing "as a reader," not a grader.

• Tell the student where you needed more information, or where something was confusing.
• Tell the student if you do not follow their argument. But also tell the student what things they are doing well. In fact, this should be among the first things you tell the student so that they are not bombarded with negative comments from the beginning of the conference.
• Telling students what they ARE doing well reinforces for them what writing skills they should use more. It also helps them gain confidence in their writing and thinking, which is half the battle to improving a student's writing process.

At the end of the conference be sure to ask the student if they have any more questions. Try to recap what took place and what should happen next. If needed, ask the student to make a follow up appointment to see the next draft.

Other resource links

Provided by:
Dr. Cynthia Haynes, who is the Director of Rhetoric and Writing at The University of Texas at Dallas. Her research interests are rhetoric, composition, electronic pedagogy, virtual systems theory, feminist theory, and critical theory. One of her main projects has been designing and teaching rhetoric and writing in synchronous multimedia learning environments (MOOs), and with Jan Rune Holmevik (University of Bergen, Norway) Cynthia co-founded LinguaMOO at UTD (1995). Their co-edited collection of essays, HIGH WIRED, is in its 2nd edition from University of Michigan Press. Their textbook, MOOniversity: A Student's Guide to Online Learning Environments, is available from Allyn & Bacon Publishing. She is currently working on a book manuscript, Beta Rhetoric: Writing, Technology, and Deconstruction (forthcoming from SUNY Press).