Tip: Making the most of student conferences
Advice for students on making meetings with your professor as painless as possible - and hopefully even helpful!
It’s been, as the youth say, a hot minute since I’ve had a week full of student conferences. (Do the youth still say that?) This week I met with students to discuss their final project topics, and it was delightful. I got to hear about their evolving thinking, answer questions that they hadn’t asked in class, and - I hope - provide some encouragement that they were on the right track. I also asked them some questions - What needed more explanation? What is most helpful to them in the class? What do they wish I would do more of? - which helps me do some course correction early in the semester (along the same lines as more formal gathering of mid-semester input from students).
Have you used student conferences with your classes? What has worked - and what have been the challenges you’ve seen?
While my students this week came prepared and asked great question, really using our time together wisely, that’s not always the case. Here are some ideas for how to prep your students to make the most of one-on-one meetings.
Advice for students…
Schedule Timely Appointments
Be proactive! Make an appointment well in advance of the assignment due date. If you want help with an upcoming assignment, schedule a meeting 1-2 weeks before the deadline. Your professor will not be impressed with an email the night before something is due, I promise. If you want feedback and suggestions on something you submitted, try to get that meeting set up right away but definitely within a week of receiving feedback. Otherwise you and your professor have both moved on, and the odds of you actually acting on the feedback you receive go down dramatically. And (almost) nothing is more frustrating to a professor than spending time to meet with you and give you feedback only to see none of that feedback make it into the next draft or the next assignment.
Bring duplicate copies of your work
This one might not apply to everyone, but if you aren't very comfortable with taking notes using technology, print out a couple copies of your assignment and bring it with you. That way your professor can have one to look at and write on, and you can have one to write your notes on - ideally you walk away with both copies. It’s helpful to also think about how your professor is more likely to give you better, more in depth feedback. Some of us are very comfortable marking up papers electronically - I'll happily sit down, pull out my iPad, mark something up, and send it to the student while we're meeting - but not everyone feels the same or has the same access to technology. You definitely don't want to spend all of your conferencing time trying to pull up the correct document and get it so that everyone can see it, so this might be a place where going back to some hard copy versions wouldn't be a bad idea.
Prepare how you’ll take notes
Before you go into this session is also a good time to think about how you will take notes. You want to show that you're paying attention (which means sometimes you have to make eye contact) but you also want to capture all of their good ideas before you leave and forget everything. If writing or typing quickly is difficult for you, or you want to be able to focus without taking notes, ask your professor if you can record the conference to listen to later. If you're meeting virtually, that should be simple enough, but a phone recording would be just as easy. Even if your professor would prefer not to be recorded, simply letting them know that you might have some difficulty taking notes quickly and you don’t want to miss anything will - hopefully - encourage them to slow down or even help make their own notes they can send you (I’ve done this plenty of times with students).
Brainstorm strategic questions
You will want to come to any meeting with specific questions to work on, and it's best if these questions are connected to the rubric or assignment expectations - this way you can focus your time on the areas where you can make the most improvement to produce a better product (and of course get a better grade). Asking thoughtful and specific questions, like: "What specific evidence would strengthen my argument?" or "How can I improve the organization of my paragraphs?" shows that you have done the work of trying to understand where you missed the mark on the assignment,
Understand the conference's purpose
Pay attention to how your professor describes the purpose of the conference, because that will tell you about what they hope you will do before coming, and what they expect you to get out of the meeting. If it's a conference where you're expected to pitch a research project idea and then talk about it with them to eventually narrow down or get approval for your idea, it's better to come with multiple possible topics just in case your first one completely misses the mark. If you are there to discuss feedback on work that you have already submitted, then you need to show that you have carefully reviewed your work and any written feedback they've provided, including the rubric scores, so that you can ask really targeted questions about how to improve.
Tip: Student Conferences
A middle step between less-structured walk-in office hours and the more-structured class time...
Tip: Strategies for Mid-Semester Student Feedback
Conducting a simple mid-semester survey allows us to check in with students when there is still ample time to adjust our approach, activities, and support in ways that can enhance their learning and improve outcomes.
In the end, I hope students walk away from these conferences with a little more clarity about…
What they’ve achieved so far (what they’ve done well)
Where they still have gaps to fill in
What they need to move forward
How to get there
Where to find support along the way (including my help!)
Share your ideas for successful student-instructor meetings!
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My teacher-friend records his writing conferences with students on Loom, which shows him highlighting text segments as they discuss it. Then he sticks the recorded link right on their essay for reference afterwards. Genius.