The Fifth circuit issued an interesting opinion on jury instructions. I’ll discuss later. For now, see Judge Higginson’s concurrence. Sadly, many informal jury charge conferences are off the record. 
It’s very common, especially in Texas, to have a very long informal jury charge conference and then a more cursory formal one where the specific objections are made without all the discussion that went into the informal.
Judge Higginson is pointing out that it would be nice to have that too, but often district judges don’t have the reporter sit in there. They want to hash it out and encourage candor, perhaps.
In federal court, what I will often do is reprise what we argued about in the informal conference in the formal. "Your honor, as you know, we discussed X and Y during the informal charge conference. Your honor did this and that in response. We still object. Let me explain..."
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