It's the middle of your writing block and you sidle up to a student to have a writing conference. And it goes great. You feel like you made a difference with that kid. You feel like you accomplished something. But then you start doing the math... "Let's see, I just spent 8 minutes with this student, so at this rate it'll only take me... hmmm... 9,000 years to meet with everyone." It quickly gets overwhelming and you may start wondering, why even bother? Holding one-to-one writing conferences with students is a really effective way to help them grow, but conferences that last 8-10 minutes a pop just aren't sustainable. Even 5-minute writing conferences are tough. So are 4 minute writing conferences. 2 minutes. That's where we want to be. Now, before you start rolling your eyes telling me you'll never get anything out of a two-minute conference, hang on. Let's just for a second assume that you CAN have a meaningful, productive wri......

You've just finished teaching a writing mini-lesson to your class, and now you send them back to their seats to dive back into the drafts they've been working on this week. You look at the clock. You smile. You've actually managed to keep your mini-lesson relatively "mini" today, which means your class has a nice chunk of time to write independently. You walk over to your desk and take a swig of your room-temperature coffee to celebrate the moment. Ahhhhh. Now what. What are you going to do? It's easy to let this time slip away drinking room-temperature coffee "supervising." But you have this nagging desire to... well, teach. So how can you make a difference? How can you use this time, be it twenty-five minutes or five, to help students become better writers? Here are five ways:   #1 CONFER AT A STUDENT'S DESK Holding one-to-one writing conferences is powerful and a classic component to any writer's workshop model. Whether......