Schedule conferences with each student on a regular basis and establish a routine for how conferences occur. Teachers listen, ask questions and support students to problem-solve their way to solutions. Students keep control and ownership of their writing.

• Listen. Let the student lead.
• Ask questions to understand the history of the piece of writing and what the writer brings to the writing situation. Try to understand how and why this writing is important. Acknowledge the writer's journey and aspirations for the writing.
• Respect the writing by not making corrections on the original. Make comments or suggestions on another piece of paper, post-it note or notebook, or create a new file with tracked changes.
• Identify the teachable moment. For example, give positive feedback, suggest subtle changes, highlight the use of conventions, or explicitly guide the writer in the use of a text-type.

Teacher-student conferences and teacher-led inquiries prepare students to conference with each other.

Assign two students to each conference group and change the pairings each week. In classrooms where students work in author circles, pair up students who aren't in the same circle as this broadens each writer's exposure to different audiences.

• Writers maintain ownership of their writing, reading aloud something they have produced that week. Some writers in Foundation make up a story to match their early writing efforts and this is encouraged.
• Peers listen in order to respond. The conference is an interactive dialogue between writers about their writing.
• Teachers initially provide guidance on how to respond and step back as students master conferencing dialogue.

Peer-to-peer conferencing and author circles provide different audiences for children to share their writing.

Create small groups of students (preferably three) who share their drafts and provide constructive feedback. Each member of the author circle is allotted time in which they read and get a response (three or four minutes is usually adequate in the lower grades). Use a timer to ensure everyone gets a chance to share.

• Writers choose a piece of their own writing to share. They ask their peers for help with any aspect of it. Students are enthusiastic about the process when they know their voices will be heard and they receive immediate feedback from an audience they value.
• Teachers guide responses initially. They instruct students to listen and comment in a certain way (for example, to listen for words that make a difference or comment on the lead sentence, to point out what is working well and how the writer attracted your attention, to ask questions that draw out more information).

Author circles are an opportunity for writers to receive constructive feedback from a real audience.