Conferences with Students

Instructors often find that individual students who might otherwise be unsuccessful in a course can be helped to do well through a few well spent office visits. The key is to have a focused plan for the student. This page gives some suggestions that other instructors have found beneficial.

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Ann Dean offers these suggestions which are particularly geared toward students in composition classes. The concepts can, however, be adapted to Business & Technical Writing activities such as letters and memos, midterm research letters, and project proposal sections. Ann's suggestion to use the Writing Center "Minimalist Tutoring" approach is also worth considering since a major goal in the Business and Technical Writing classes is to help students become independent, efficient writers.

Meeting in Your Office

When a student comes to your office hour for help, it can be frustrating. Often teachers will have great conversations with students and feel good about where the paper could go. Then the next draft will have no revisions, or the student will seem to have forgotten what the conversation in the office was about. In order to use office hours better, I have started using the same principles tutors use in the Writing Centers. We call this "Minimalist Tutoring." The central idea is that the tutor should be less active than the student. In other words, when a student comes to your office, ask HIM to read and write, rather than reading and writing for him. Here are some specific ways to do this:

Ask the student to find the most important passage in the reading and make a list of all the words, phrases, and ideas in it she does not understand. Then get out a dictionary for the difficult words and point out sentence constructions like "if.. .then" or "because."

Then have the student put the new version of the passage into her own words. THEN, ask the student what she just did and how she did it. Ask her if she could do it at home, if you were not there, with another passage. And tell her that to improve her papers she needs to do that with EVERY quotation in her paper.

Ask the student to find the weakest paragraph in her paper (she can often do this). Ask her what is wrong with it. She might say that she wrote it just because she ran out of things to say but the paper wasn't long enough, or a variety of other things.

If you think the paragraph has potential, suggest a revision strategy. Ask her to write about her idea about the ideas in the paragraph. Ask her to find a quotation and insert it.

Ask her to circle every important word or idea in a quotation and write about each one. Have her do this right there in your office (you can go get a soda or grade another paper). Then talk about how the paragraph is better or worse.

If you don't think the paragraph has potential, ask the student to find the best paragraph in the paper, and work on expanding it. The student can write endings to sentences like "This idea is important because. . ." "This idea would be important to the authors of the readings because…" "This idea is confusing because. . ." "Someone who would be interested in this idea is…" This way she can practice working with implications and suggestions.

THEN, ask the student what she just did and how she did it. Ask her if she could do it at home, if you were not there, with another passage. And tell her that to improve her papers she needs to do that with EVERY paragraph in her paper.

You can come up with your own strategies. Think about what you do when you read, write, and revise, and ask students to do those things in your office. That way they can see what it feels like to read, write, and revise in new ways.

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Debra Roy gives this great advice: "The best advice that I can offer about assisting struggling students is to obtain information and to practice early intervention--that is, for students who want the assistance. Like all 'things that really work,' this involves work." Some of what Debra writes is specifically related to students in composition classes, but much of what you read here clearly relates to students who take Business & Technical Writing classes.

Student records can be accessed through the Rutgers computer system by Writing Program personnel; Grade Information Sheets are on file in Murray 108 (and on the campus on which the course was taught) for all students who have failed Writing Program classes, including the instructor's report on the student's problems and progress. Examining such information can help you to determine whether a student is repeating a pattern that led to failure in an earlier semester and to assess the pattern's implications.

Of course, you should also ask the student to help you to better understand his/her situation. If at all possible, get students into your office! Struggling students rarely take the initiative to drop by during office hours, but they're usually willing to come when asked-indeed, many hope that their difficulties will be noticed and addressed.

I customarily schedule two conferences with each student whose second essay is clearly below the passing level (or when they've turned in little or no work at all). It's important during the first meeting to encourage a student to share his/her understanding of the situation with you-which often includes external factors such as family and employment commitments. As you might imagine, students are eager to account for failing work and to assuage fears that they're "not smart" or are too "bad at English" to ever succeed in the course. Certainly, you can reassure them that they're acquiring "learnable" skills appropriate for their level, and that some students need additional assistance or more than one semester to gain proficiency in these skills. At times, even though a student cites problems that aren't directly related to writing, you may be able to give them badly needed assistance-for example, a medical or family situation may warrant referring the student to a dean/academic advisor or counselor. Campus directors can help you to locate the appropriate person.

A student's problems and anxieties are usually typical enough of first-year college life to find relief, to some extent, through talking. This may position us, somewhat uncomfortably, as therapists-but listening to students goes with the territory. Given the prominence of large lecture courses in first-year students' schedules, your students may view you as one of very few approachable people at Rutgers. I discovered that when I cut off students impatiently during personal narratives so as to discuss their writing, they interpreted me as caring little about them as people, and their resentment adversely affected their work. Offering guarded but sympathetic responses (and an occasional tissue) doesn't mean getting involved unduly in your students' personal lives-and it certainly doesn't mean letting them off the hook. Such sessions usually end with the student agreeing that s/he will work harder in the course, and a second visit is contingent upon the student bringing in a draft of his/her current essay.

Of course, some students will launch directly into a discussion of their papers. You may have a student who will, however nicely, explain her failing marks as your deficiency rather than hers. Such students imply or maintain an equality between their judgment and yours, or marshal other authorities (parents, teachers, tutors, friends) to reinforce their position that they are writing passing-level essays. The best approach, in my experience, is to share our grading criteria with them. [Grading criteria are now easily accessible on the Writing Program web site.] While some of the language will seem "vague," students are comforted by the fact that shared criteria exist among all sections of the same course (the belief that a friend taking another section has an "easier" teacher than you is widespread). You'll need to point out, however, that the criteria is not an "objective" rulebook that is simply "applied" to each paper-or else accurate grading software would truly replace us. You may also want to discuss their most recent paper in light of each guideline for a "C" essay. It's particularly useful to have on hand a paragraph or two from a C-level essay (ask the 101 coordinator for samples if you don't have any) that, in contrast to the student's paper, clearly demonstrates a significant moment of textual engagement and/or connection between two texts. It's at this point of comparison that struggling students frequently articulate their dawning understanding that we're encouraging them to become engrossed in some problem or issue raised by their readings.

Once such "blockages" have been loosened, the work itself can be tackled more productively. Rather than repeat written comments, I've found it most helpful to ask students to read a working draft aloud, pausing when they would like to clarify something or when I want clarification. (Note: Asking students to read portions of drafts aloud in peer-review sessions is also quite useful!) This tends to result in students actually hearing what they've written and readily identifying weaknesses. In fact, they're usually too hard on themselves at this point, so you'll want to set them to work revising a crucial moment on paper and praise them for their improvement.

Certainly the work that you do with your struggling students in your office is not intended to substitute for missed classes, replace tutoring, or serve as a quick fix for a range of problems that are not going away in one semester. But individual conferencing can significantly move struggling students toward realizing that when they write expository essays, they're communicating to another human being-someone who's truly interested in what they have to say when a genuine effort is being made.

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Priti Joshi offers the following strategy to prepare for individual conferences with students at mid-semester. It's a way to organize a meeting that is productive and time efficient. Self-evaluation can work in the Business & Technical Writing classes just as well as it has for Priti in composition classes.

Mid-Semester "Self Report"

The "self-report" or evaluation is something I have students do when I return their folders after midterm folder review. I ask them to take a few moments to re-read their first three papers along with my comments on these papers. When they are done, I ask them to write a short 'report" evaluating their writing. I ask them to write what they have learned about writing, what they believe their strengths are, and what continue to be weaknesses that they need to attend to.

I have always found this to be an enormously useful exercise and my students always say that they get a great deal from it. The self-report allows students to re-group and recharge. It comes at that point in the semester when many students are feeling glum and resentful: they may continue to be "stuck" at a particular grade level no matter how hard they try or they may feel that they have "learned nothing" all semester. The self-report allows them to go back and see their early papers and see that they have indeed come a long way. Many students write, "My first paper was ALL summary. I can't believe I didn't see it at the time." This really helps their attitude at this point in the semester.

The self-evaluation also allows them to articulate what our criteria are and position themselves within those criteria. This makes them more active learners in the process and more independent, rather than passively waiting for me to be re-iterating their writing strengths and weaknesses each time. Finally, in asking them to re-read my comments, they get a fresh sense of what I am asking them to do. Many students write, "I didn't understand your comments on my first paper when I first read them. But now I really do see what you mean." Every time I have done self-reports, there has been an almost magical buoyancy and renewal in the class subsequently (perhaps I exaggerate, but only mildly!).

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Midterm Self Evaluation

Name: ______________________________________

In order to help guide you toward successfully completing the oral presentation and final project proposal, I'd like you to please answer the following questions as thoroughly as you can. Feel free to add any additional comments or continue your answers on the back of this paper, or onto another sheet if necessary.

1. What do you feel are the strengths of your project so far?
   
   
2. What do you feel are the weaknesses of your project?
   
   
3. Are you pleased with your midterm paper? Are there things you wish you had done differently?
   
   
4. In moving toward the oral presentation and final project proposal, are there any difficulties you expect to encounter?
   If so, what are they?
   
   
5. What sort of guidance and help would you like from the professor to help you overcome the obstacles you feel might be in the way of your final work for this course? Is there anything you wish the professor had done differently so far?
   
   
6. What can you do to make your oral presentation and final project proposal a success? What can you do to make the best possible use of your professor's availability and guidance? Of classroom time?

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Tap Talk

There is a newsletter at Rutgers especially for teaching assistants but available to all. Called "Tap Talk", the newsletter is sent in print form to TA's. In the March 2001 issue of Tap Talk, there is a brief article and another good sample Mid-Semester Evaluation that your students might be given. For those who don't have a print copy, the email address for Tap Talk is tapweb@rci.rutgers.edu. As with the form developed by Lauren Sarat (see above), the form in Tap Talk helps to structure the conference between instructor and student.

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