How's It Going?: A Practical Guide to Conferring with Student Writers

Our one-on-one talks with students during writing workshop offer us perfect opportunities to zero in on what each student needs as a writer. As Lead Staff Developer for the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, Carl Anderson has provided hundreds of teachers with the information and confidence they need to make these complex conferences an effective part of classroom practice. Finally, in How's It Going?, Anderson shares his expertise with the rest of us.

For Anderson, the key to a powerful writing conference lies in understanding that it is a conversation with a clear purpose and a predictable structure. This is the best lens through which to view the task of talking about writing. To that end, Anderson shows how we can take what we already know about having effective conversations and use that knowledge. Sample transcripts of conferences with elementary and middle school students in both urban and suburban settings walk us through the process step by step, providing new insight into how ambitious conferences unfold.

Above all, How's It Going? is a practical book. Written in a conversational style, it's filled with lots of useful advice, including an in-depth discussion of the teacher's role in conferences, strategies for teaching students to take an active role, ways to weave in literature, minilessons, classroom management strategies, and responses to the most frequently asked questions about conferring. Along the way, readers will learn new ways of thinking, develop effective techniques, and perfect straightforward strategies. At the same time, they'll grasp the art and logic of conferring, and with this learning in mind, discover for themselves how to confer well.

Carl Anderson is one of the nation's leading experts on teaching writing to students in grades K-12. Carl was first an elementary and then a middle school teacher. He taught students of diverse backgrounds in city, rural, and suburban schools in New York City, Bardstown, Kentucky, and Northbrook, Illinois. In 1994, Carl joined the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project at Columbia University, which was founded and is directed by Lucy Calkins. As a Project staff developer for eight years, Carl worked side-by-side with teachers in elementary and middle school classrooms in New York City and in its surrounding suburbs, showing them how to establish writing workshops for their students. While at the Project, Carl began an intensive study of writing conferences. This study led to his first book, How's It Going? A Practical Guide to Conferring with Student Writers (2000), and later to his second book, Assessing Writers (2004) and his series Strategic Writing Conferences: Smart Conversations that Move Young Writers Forward Grades 3-6 (2009). Today, Carl works as a consultant in schools across the United States. He continues to spend most of his days in classrooms with teachers and students, where he concentrates on helping teachers learn to have effective writing conferences that change students' lives as writers.