Peer Conferring: Questions

I’m intrigued by peer conferring.  There’s just something about two writers coming together to talk about their work that’s interesting to me.  I love the nuances of peer conferring — learning what works well and what doesn’t.  I like to study really strong collaborations to find the little-known-secrets to a specific grade level of writers.  And I like to offer advice to young writers on ways to truly help one another.

One successful peer conference is a QUESTION CONFERENCE.  In this conference, the responder simply asks the writer questions.  In order to teach this technique, I model it in a minilesson.  I’ve found it works best if the responder first reads through the draft.  This way he has a sense of the whole.  So I begin my minilesson with a draft students are familiar with from previous lessons or I give them a minute to read my draft for the first time.

Then I teach the process of a Question Conference.  I read the draft to my students stopping throughout to gather questions.  I ask them to share any question they have as I read.  Then I write the questions all over the margins of my draft.  I then share with students how I use the questions to guide my revision.  I mark specific questions which make me think or the questions I think are most important.  Then I determine how I will use them to revise.  Sometimes I change my ending, other times I add in an entire part, and yet sometimes I sprinkle new information throughout my draft.

A few years ago I read about Question Grids in Nancy Steineke’s Reading and Writing Together:  Collaborative Literacy in Action (Heinemann, 2002).  So I took the idea of a Question Conference and made a Peer Conference Record to help scaffold the discussion of middle school writers.   Below is a copy of it.

If you give Question Conferences a whirl (or have in the past), I’d love to hear some of your thoughts.