Effective writing conferences are more than one-on-one check-ins with students. Guided by clear instructional purposes, teacher-student conversations become an indispensable means to move writers forward on their individual, developmental learning journeys.

Anderson's new firsthand resource helps demystify conferring for teachers by revealing the predictable structure underlying effective conferences and providing a collection of 100 such instructional conversations, each with its own teaching point aimed at helping writers develop over time.

Teachers will discover how to use conferences to help move writers forward in all three stages of the writing process—during the early stages, where students are largely concerned with gathering ideas; in the middle stages, where drafting becomes their central concern; and in the late stages, where students focus mainly on revising and editing.

Video examples of teacher-student interactions at each phase of the writing cycle illuminate the moves and language of effective conferences and provide the kind of modeling that helps teachers imagine themselves in the same kinds of strategic conversations with their own students.