Engaged Student Conferences

In retrospect, my first active learning experiences came via the one-to-one conferences I have always had with my students on their composition papers. You may ask, "How could two people conferring be anything but active learning?" But in my earliest years, I tended to focus too much on surface revision and explaining concepts, something more in the way of proofreading and mini-lectures. It only took a short while to see that such sessions weren't very helpful to the students, and given the limited time for scheduled conferences and the brevity of the traditional semester, these sessions were obviously neither efficient nor productive.

What I learned from those rough, early sessions was that since each student's needs and progress could vary greatly from the next's, there was no pattern for the conference, however much it may seem so when the advice and suggestions grow so familiar. Most importantly, I decided that to be specifically helpful to individual students, the conference needed to be led and focused by those students, even if they weren't aware that they were doing so. For me that means letting the students report on their work, their progress, their difficulties, and their direction. Often I have to prompt them for this information, but when I get that information, I'm better able to offer the encouragement or suggestions that will benefit them most; so even if this conversational model is a bit slower, and I don't think it necessarily is, in the end it's more effective and, therefore, a better use of the fifteen minutes I alot for each session. Ideally, in most sessions, the students should spend as much and often more time talking than I do.