Conducting Writing Conferences: A Simple Goal-Driven Approach

Writing conferences used to be a nightmare in my classroom. They usually involved me and my trusty red pen going through a students’ writing, marking it up— adding suggestion, highlighting misspelled words or missing punctuation. And, after about 5 minutes or so, I'd had the paper back to students and move on to the next student. There was no talk of writing strategies, no mention of writing goals, no modeling methods to improve student writing. Nope - just a bunch of red lines (and li...