Tuesday, March 30, 2004
Conferencing, Criteria, and Methodology
Kathryn Evans
Contradictions abound in the literature on conferencing. Many researchers and practitioners, for instance, discuss the importance of getting students to talk more and teachers to talk less. A study by Walker and Elias (RTE 1987), however, suggests that who does how much talking is not necessarily relevant.
Looking at five conferences judged to be successful by both student and teacher and five judged to be unsuccessful, Walker and Elias found that students averaged 32.8% percent of the utterances in the highly-rated conferences, while in the low-rated conferences students averaged 33.6 percent of the utterances—hardly a difference. Rather than who does how much talking, they suggest, successful conferences centered on evaluating the student's work based on explicit criteria. This evaluation was accomplished neither by the student doing the evaluation alone nor by the instructor doing it alone, but rather by the instructor eliciting evaluation from the student and then explicitly responding to and building on that evaluation.
A case study I’m doing with some of my former students supports Walker and Elias’ findings. Like Newkirk (RTE 1995), I’m prompting students to reflect on conferences by having them listen to and comment on an audiotape of the conference. While Newkirk studied one-on-one conferences and I’m looking at small-group conferences, his methodology remains illustrative. After listening to a tape of a small-group conference, one student, Christa, said she had trouble articulating everything she needed to say about her classmate’s writing. Remembering Walker and Elias’ study (and my practice of using criteria to structure one-on-one conferences), I asked if it would help to have the criteria on the table in front of us. Her reply lends further support to Walker and Elias’ findings: “That would be helpful. That would be really helpful. Um, we could get it a little, yeah definitely helpful, especially with long papers because, um, at least for myself I’m a visual person and I can’t necessarily . . . wrap my head around all of the factors on every single page and every section of the paper all at once.” She also countered my concern that I had talked too much, noting that she was “very thankful and grateful when you would start talking.” Newkirk’s methodology, then—at least in this case study—helps to further confirm Walker and Elias’ finding that who does how much talking is not necessarily relevant to the success of a conference. This methodology, I believe, would also give us insight into the other pieces of conflicting advice that abound in the literature on conferencing.
Looking at five conferences judged to be successful by both student and teacher and five judged to be unsuccessful, Walker and Elias found that students averaged 32.8% percent of the utterances in the highly-rated conferences, while in the low-rated conferences students averaged 33.6 percent of the utterances—hardly a difference. Rather than who does how much talking, they suggest, successful conferences centered on evaluating the student's work based on explicit criteria. This evaluation was accomplished neither by the student doing the evaluation alone nor by the instructor doing it alone, but rather by the instructor eliciting evaluation from the student and then explicitly responding to and building on that evaluation.
A case study I’m doing with some of my former students supports Walker and Elias’ findings. Like Newkirk (RTE 1995), I’m prompting students to reflect on conferences by having them listen to and comment on an audiotape of the conference. While Newkirk studied one-on-one conferences and I’m looking at small-group conferences, his methodology remains illustrative. After listening to a tape of a small-group conference, one student, Christa, said she had trouble articulating everything she needed to say about her classmate’s writing. Remembering Walker and Elias’ study (and my practice of using criteria to structure one-on-one conferences), I asked if it would help to have the criteria on the table in front of us. Her reply lends further support to Walker and Elias’ findings: “That would be helpful. That would be really helpful. Um, we could get it a little, yeah definitely helpful, especially with long papers because, um, at least for myself I’m a visual person and I can’t necessarily . . . wrap my head around all of the factors on every single page and every section of the paper all at once.” She also countered my concern that I had talked too much, noting that she was “very thankful and grateful when you would start talking.” Newkirk’s methodology, then—at least in this case study—helps to further confirm Walker and Elias’ finding that who does how much talking is not necessarily relevant to the success of a conference. This methodology, I believe, would also give us insight into the other pieces of conflicting advice that abound in the literature on conferencing.
