Conferencing with our students may be the most powerful way we can help them advance in their writing. One issue that Calkins brings to light is that many (maybe even most) teachers have given up on conferencing, largely due to time constraints. We feel tremendous pressure to cover material in order to prepare our students to pass the state test. But in my own experience, conferencing with students has been the only strategy that consistently promotes growth in writing.
Something that I've learned about my own conferencing style regards how to ask questions. Calkins refers to one step in questioning as the "research stage," and I really like her analogy. We are seeking to discover a student's motivation for writing the piece, ascertain their current affect, ask them to assess how good they think their piece is, all of which helps direct a their effort to learn how to improve their writing. In terms of my own questioning, I have to admit that it takes on more of a "fix it" role rather than an exploration of my students' motives. In the end, I want them to do the work in the learning, not me.
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Using my newfound knowledge to create a different approach to conferencing will be very difficult. I'm still sorting it out. I need to set my students up to work on other things without interrupting conferences. I'm scared that while I'm conferencing, I will have a student in the corner drawing in sharpie on his face.
It is so important that we can build our own style on conferencing base in some good strategies for asking questions to our students. Like you said, conferencing is a good approach to let students grow in writing.
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