DeSanctis, C; Murray, K --- "The Art of the Writing Conference: Letting Students Set the Agenda without Ceding Control" [2008] LegEdDig 9; (2008) 16(1) Legal Education Digest 31

• The art of the writing conference: letting students set the agenda without ceding control

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The art of the writing conference: letting students set the agenda without ceding control

C DeSanctis & K Murray

Geo Wash U LS Pub L & Legal Theory Working Paper No. 369, 2007, pp 1–13

Writing is, at bottom, a highly individualised enterprise requiring hands-on practice and implicating a range of personal styles, preferences and, often, idiosyncrasies on the part of both writers and audiences. When we are asked to give presentations to large groups on ‘good writing,’ our reaction is often that the task and the goal are fundamentally incompatible. While some features of good writing can be conveyed in lecture format, the reality is that most learning is the result of a more extended give-and-take process: the student-writer executes an assignment, and the teacher-reader reviews the work product and provides extensive commentary on what worked well and what could be improved going forward.

That said, teaching or supervising the writing process through one-on-one conferences can be extremely time-consuming. The question necessarily becomes how best to structure these meetings in order to maximise efficiency and utility.

Conferencing with students one-on-one is a common pedagogical technique employed in the course of supervising many law school writing assignments. Indeed, conferences often are a required part of a first-year legal research and writing curriculum, sometimes mandated for each major writing assignment, and sometimes required to occur at a strategic point in the course of a longer assignment. They also may be employed in upper-level legal research and writing and seminar courses, or in the process of journal note-writing. And, almost by definition, independent legal writing projects are supervised in a one-on-one setting. Thus, on a practical level, one-on-one teacher-student conferences have long been recognised as an important resource for the execution of a variety of law school writing assignments.

Talking about the writing process and talking through individual assignments or specific writing problems stimulates independent learning. As previously stated, student conferencing also provides an individualised learning experience. From the student’s perspective, this kind of individual attention assuages some of the anonymity concomitant with hundred-person lectures that often comprise the bulk of a first-year student’s law school experience. From the teacher’s perspective, individual meetings enable teachers to address — and even to embrace — differences in skill levels in a way that a large- class setting typically does not facilitate. At a more personal level, the one-on-one meeting offers an opportunity to get to know students as people and also as writers.

In the same vein, one-on-one conferences can be used to teach specific strategies to specific students, making it more likely that teachers will ‘tie instruction to the particular paper and focus on what to do next, suggesting strategies for the writer to use rather than merely identifying problems.’ Perhaps most importantly, given that one-on-one meetings necessarily depend on live interaction between writers and readers, conferencing can help emphasise that writing is a form of communicating. For many first-year law students navigating their way through the complexities of legal rules and (sometimes arcane) legal doctrine, clear thinking is often the byproduct of verbalisation and discussion.

Stated otherwise, the dialogue between student and teacher itself is a vitally important part of the writing process.

Finally, and to the benefit of all participants, teacher-student conferences can be used after-the- fact to shape classroom dynamics. If, instead, teachers take notes during (or shortly following) individual conferences with an eye toward gathering global comments applicable to a larger audience, that feedback later can be shared with the class as a whole and may assist students who did not present certain issues but nevertheless would benefit from the discussion of those issues in the long term.

Teachers also can take cues from the students in these meetings to gather information about their learning styles, about what has worked and has not worked in the classroom. Finally, but not insignificantly, teachers can use these one-on-one meetings as an opportunity to get to know their students on a personal level.

Writing teachers largely agree that meetings are most productive and valuable to students when students set the agenda for the conference.

A solely teacher-driven conference agenda likely will be unsuccessful for several reasons. First, it generally results in less investment on the part of the student-writer. Though it is difficult to envision a world in which we provide too much feedback, the reality is that a solely teacher-driven conference can be overwhelming. On the flip side, the focus of the conference may be too specific, with the student getting only a narrow idea of what needs to be fixed. The goal, of course, is not to tell them what you want them to write but, instead, to foster higher-level and transferable thought about writing choices, why a writer makes them and what effect they might have on a reader.

Of course, a student’s ability to set a conference agenda is necessarily shaped by her experience and comfort level as a legal writer. Such expertise, in turn, determines how heavy an influence the student needs from the teacher’s guiding hand.

Our experience has been that first-semester law students, unsurprisingly, generally will require more direction in agenda-setting. In years where we have asked our students simply to ‘come to the conference with an agenda,’ we have received everything from long lists of questions to claims of having no questions at all.

For these kinds of conferences, teachers can dictate a more detailed agenda by asking predetermined questions about the assignments. To facilitate useful answers, conferencing questions should be broad enough to encourage participation but narrow enough to anticipate a wide range of answers. Toward that end, we have found it useful to issue, in advance of a conference, a ‘questionnaire’ that serves a dual purpose: self-reflection and conference preparation.

Our mid-year conferences move from solely writer-based questions to both reader and writer- focused questions. At this juncture, we are concerned not only with the student’s experience with the writing project, but also with the product itself. Thus, though we continue to ask questions about the student’s experience with the writing endeavour, we also begin to discuss what the student-writer feels are the strongest and weakest parts of the paper from a reader’s perspective. At this point, students often are more comfortable with both legal writing and with conferencing, and they consequently bring a more ambitious agenda to the conference than our guided questions propose.

Finally, by the end of the year, our conferences move largely to reader-based discussions. These discussions transcend the writer-as-individual and, instead, focus on how choices in writing can and do influence readers. Because we teach responsive writing in the spring semester (and pair students with opposing counsel for their assignments), we ask students questions not only about their own writing, but about the work produced by their opponents. We have found that this process enables students to engage with substantive arguments at an advanced level, and to learn positively from looking at examples of others’ writing. We attempt to keep the discussion positive, so we tend to favour questions directed toward how the student-writer would respond to an argument rather than how she could make that argument better. Thus, by the end of the first year, students have moved from writer-based discussions where the product is the focus to reader-based discussions where the effect is paramount. As a result, we have found a stronger tendency on the part of our students to evaluate critically their own work, as well as that of their colleagues, in a depersonalised and structured way that is probably not possible at the outset of the year.

Substantively, one-on-one meetings at this level should be timed to occur along a natural arc beginning with topic selection and ending with the final draft. In early conferences, when students have a topic but must engage in a narrowing process, the agenda necessarily will be more abstract and process-oriented. Again, teachers can use guided questioning at this stage to help a student determine what she wants to say and how best to support her thesis with substantial research. Mid- process meetings will be largely student-driven because they are often student-requested; teachers can manage these meetings by offering to answer specific student questions (‘Is this a supportable assertion?’) rather than assenting to often-sought-after generalised feedback (‘Am I on the right track?’). Later meetings likely should centre on the product itself (outline or draft), which often are precipitated by a student having some written work already in hand. As a pedagogical matter, teachers should be unambiguous as to their availability and willingness to review outlines, drafts, and other interim products; one should be prepared, however, to provide at least one substantive review of a paper before the final draft is submitted. A conference on this draft can be shaped by the margin or end comments provided on the paper; at this level, students should be expected to internalise those comments and to formulate a conference agenda where they not only attempt to answer specific questions, but seek additional advice regarding organisation or substance of the draft.

As we have discussed, one-on-one student conferences can and do serve important pedagogical and practical functions as part of a first-year legal writing curriculum and, as well, as part of upper- level courses or independent instruction where paper-writing is a component.