I have individual writing conferences with my students for every written piece they produce, usually between their first and second drafts. They take forfuckingever—5 minutes per conference with 30 kids equals two-and-a-half hours—but that little bit of focused time makes each kid feel special and accountable. When I first started teaching, I would scribble all over the kids’ papers pointing out every little thing they did wrong, and believe me, the mistakes were various and sundry. And eventually I learned that that approach made them (a) feel totally demoralized and (b) hate writing.
Now I do things differently. For starters, I never write on their papers directly; I take notes on a separate sheet and let them make any changes on their own papers. Not only does it help them learn to revise and edit, but it gives them ownership of their writing process. But the most important lesson I’ve learned is, if I list ten to fifteen things they did well first and then one or two things they could work on, they’ll improve the hell out of those one or two things and feel proud of themselves to boot.
I take a similar tack for parent-teacher conferences. I tell the parents everything that’s great about their kid, everything their kid does well, every way in which the kid meets or exceeds my expectations, and then I give them an area or two where the kid could improve. Today I had a conference with the parent of a reasonably smart, totally charming, sorta naughty, completely undiagnosed-ADD kid. I started off by saying, “I think —- is having a good year. He seems to be learning a lot.” That’s as far as I got, and this woman burst into tears! She said in her thick Russian accent, “I’m so sorry. It’s the first time I hear something like this about my son. Whenever I come to school and people say, ‘Are you —-‘s mother?’, I freeze because I wait to hear them tell me how bad he is.” It just broke my heart.