Conferences are a great way to personalise your check-in to get immediate formative data about students and their understanding. Conferences can be very quickly done and allow you one-on-one time with your students to target your assessment.

Conferences can be made a regular addition to a class to help the process become normalised. Students can be flagged for targeted assistance, or you may discover you can move on with your teaching.

Conferences can help teachers:

• Get valuable one-on-one time with their students

• Evaluate understanding of individuals in a safe space

• Make formative assessment check-ins a regular part of the class

• Adjust their teaching for a group or for targeted students

• If you have a rubric, you can use it to guide your conference questioning!

• Conferences can be a classroom norm, so students get used to the idea of working independently while you manage your conferences

• Conferences can be time consuming, so you can give students a brief beforehand so they can prepare answers and evidence

• Try group conferences with members from different groups. This could help students gauge the progress of their own team compared to the class

• Leave a section of the conference to allow students to ask you for clarification or more deep feedback on their work so far