This week, Cummings and Stancliffe write convincingly about the benefits of teacher-student conferences (In Our Own Voice, Strategies). As I revised my syllabus, I added a component requiring a multimedia composition. Students may chose which assignment they would like to compose multimodally. As it stands now, I have students writing a proposal for each assignment. In the proposal, they will detail in which mode they will compose. After this week’s readings, I’m considering replacing the proposal with a conference. Students that are composing multimodally will be required to conference with me beforehand in order to discuss the options of their chosen format. This will give me a chance to pre-approve a student’s ideas and to make sure they have the tools they need. I’m not sure if I should require a conference instead of a proposal, or in addition to a proposal. I’m wary that a proposal for each of the many assignments, especially for written compositions, will be dull for both me and the students.
On a different note, I found both Straub’s guidelines for responding and Kahn’s practice of conversational response useful (Strategies). The theories these two express map well with my pedagogy: valuing praise, asking questions, and responding as a collaborator. I made an extra effort to be conversational on my responses to this week’s batch of student essays. I said a lot of things like “I’m confused here;” repeated students’ own words; and asked questions intended to get them to engage more deeply with their own ideas. Unfortunately, as these papers don’t require another draft, I’m not sure I’ll have any clear idea of whether or not students benefitted from my increasingly conversational tone.
Comments
I think it’s a good idea to conference about multimodal work with students while projects are still in the proposal stage. You might consider having them develop a truncated proposal of some sort to bring to these conferences. This piece of writing will help the students focus their ideas and make the conference more productive. You don’t necessarily have to grade the writing, but can give student credit for bringing it to the conference.