ISUComm Foundation Courses requires that you conference individually with each student. While you can give students brief one-on-one attention during work times in class or in the computer labs, you are expected to schedule 15- to 20-minute required conferences with students either once or twice a semester. These conferences take the place of regularly scheduled class meetings. If you choose to hold more than two conference sessions with your class, you may not cancel class for these additional meetings. Be aware that conferences early in the semester help to foster an effective teacher–student relationship.
By meeting with students one-on-one, instructors can discuss a student’s accomplishments and struggles in a more personal environment. Sometimes teachers ask students to show a draft of an essay, poster, or PowerPoint presentation, or to rehearse an oral presentation during the conference. Research indicates that students benefit more from discussing a work in progress rather than previously assessed student work. In addition, conferences offer an occasion for instructors to better understand the needs of the students and class as a whole. Students, in turn, are able to reexamine a complex concept that has troubled them, ask questions they were hesitant to ask during class, or revise an area of an essay that could not have been addressed in the normal classroom setting.
Conferences may be substituted once or twice a semester for regular class meetings. These conferences are to be formally scheduled in advance with all students. Instructors count a student’s missing a conference as equal to a class absence. Do not cancel more than 3 to 4 classes for conferences each semester.
One-on-one conferences are key times for you to encourage students to talk about the rhetorical choices they have made and can make in assignments and how they make those choices. These are moments when you can bolster student confidence in their ability to develop their own strategies, voice, and style. They can see you as a mentor and partner instead of someone who is going to tell them how to do an assignment the “right” way.