Today, I spent six hours doing conferences, with a break to attend my teaching practicum class. I filled up on Skittles and Pepsi on the way to my second shift of meetings. By the time my 6:00 PM conference finished, I had the sugar shakes.
I have realized that I have a love-hate relationship with conferences. I feel that the students benefited but I stressed myself out in the process.This semester was the first time I have ever scheduled conferences into the syllabus and had one with every student. I'm not sure why I waited so long, but normally I reserved meetings for students that were having issues. That being said, those meetings didn't take that long because I knew what had to be worked on, having suggested the conference for a reason.
Okay, so I began with 30 minute slots and had students bring their essays to the meeting. That was my first mistake. I have heard some great advice from other Graduate Assistants (Morgan and Tara), and I know that from now on, I will be having the students fill out a form about what they want to work on. Does anyone else have some tips about conferences?
Though I have not yet had the chance to conference a whole class, I can see that it could get a bit stressful. I used to do 30-minute writing center sessions, though. It seems like trying to cover a lot of things in a conference could leave both instructor and student a little overwhelmed. As I was saying in the book review presentations, I really value simplicity, and try to cover a small number of things well versus a lot of things quickly. Maybe a short conference could be limited to covering maybe 3-5 main points about an essay, along with having the student take the lead in asking some questions. A lot of times students say they don't have any questions, but sometimes they do, and it makes asking everyone that worth it.
ReplyDeleteBring these thoughts to class for our discussion on Thursday after break!
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