How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Parent-Teacher Conferences
Fall of 2022 marked the beginning of my thirty-second year in a classroom. For many of those years, the approaching date of conferences filled me with dread. And I know I wasn’t the only one. Talking with colleagues, we would psych ourselves up and tell each other that we were fine. We really meant F.I.N.E., as in the acronym from the 2003 movie The Italian Job but whatever. Since a parent once accused me (and some of my colleagues, I found out later) of giving her child cancer by overworking them, I think I had good reason to feel Freaked out, Insecure, Neurotic, and Emotional as conferences approached. About ten years ago, that began to change. I went on a journey to try to find a way to make those conferences less confrontational and more collaborative.
My school has said that parent-teacher conferences should be “student led” as part of having students “own their learning.” We have had students prepare to present or answer questions during their advisory time around midterm, but often the students don’t engage in much reflection because they knew when the rubber hit the road either the teacher or parent/caregiver would run the conference and they would become a passive bystander. Somewhere around ten years ago, I put my foot down. I told my students in the week before conferences that I believed in the idea of conferences being student-led and that they should expect to do so. I provided them with questions for reflection, and class time to work on them. When the students and caregivers arrived for the conference, I introduced myself, we sat down around a table, and I said while looking the student in the eyes, “So, what are we here to talk about today?” Then I shut up.
What usually happened at that point was the student worked their way through the questions I had given them. Occasionally, I would have a parent try to take over the conversation. I cut them off, remind them that the school believes in student-led conferences, tell them that they and I will have an opportunity to speak later, and ask the student to continue. The depth of the student’s reflection varied depending on the student. Some were very thoughtful. Most were meh.
The initial questions were ones like:
Reflect on where you are right now in your learning.
What is going well?
With what, if anything, are you struggling?
Describe your learning process in this course
What are you doing in class that has the best impact on your learning?
What are you doing out of class to impact your learning?
Ask your teacher for suggestions on how to hone these practices to make them even more impactful.
Is there anything that you would like your teacher to know about your work right now for his/her class?
How much time are you spending outside of class on work for this course?
Do you feel successful?
What I came to realize was that the problem wasn’t (just) the students. The questions I was asking them to use were not really helping them understand where they were in the course, why they were there, and what they needed to do to improve. I changed questions to ask specifically about preparation, growth, what they do when they don’t understand something in class, and where they thought they needed the most help. That was better, but the average fourteen- or fifteen-year-old may not yet have the ability to sit and ruminate on those questions. I have had students who honestly did not understand how their final grade was calculated, even though I used total points to create a running average—no wonky percentages, weighted assignments, or other complicated formulas.
There had to be a better way.
Like many others, I have flirted with having a gradeless classroom for a number of years though within the confines of a school that still requires grades. For a while I experimented with just putting feedback on items returned and putting the grade into the gradebook. A blog post I wrote for Teachers Going Gradeless reflected my thoughts at the time:
According to a study done by Ruth Butler in 1987, it’s not through grades but rather through comprehensive feedback. Grades actually seem to inhibit growth because the focus is on the grade, rather than the learning. Even when paired with feedback in another form, students who received a grade did not demonstrate as much growth as those who received comments alone. My gut told me something was wrong with the idea that grades were needed to provide motivation and meaningful learning. Turns out there was actually research to support this idea.
Arthur Chiaravalli’s Descriptive Grading Criteria (file)
As a staff, we have been having conversations around this for a number of years and the school has become more willing to let faculty experiment. I received permission to change my approach. I borrowed the concept of a course Descriptive Grading Criteria from Arthur Chiaravalli. My school was not excited about the students and caregivers not having a fixed idea of their grade until the end of the semester, so I instituted a series of five checkpoints throughout the semester. The students are required to looks at the Descriptive Grading Criteria and explain what grade they think should have at that moment in time. If I agree, I post it along with the student’s comments. If I don’t, I post the grade I feel the student has earned, their comments, and my response. There is no running average. As a result, the students are being asked to regularly consider what progress they have made and explain why they are where they are at that moment in time.
Shifting to a gradeless environment helped my students understand and explain what they are learning and how that relates to their grade. With regular practice assessing their own progress, students are now better able to articulate that to parents and caregivers. My hope was that this change in approaching grading, among other things, would lead to more robust conversations during conferences. I am thrilled to say that they did. Students were able to talk authoritatively about the course, their learning, and their specific strengths and weaknesses thus far. On the two occasions when a parent did come into the conference with concerns, the student was able to allay those concerns with minimal input from me. Students felt confident in their understanding and their needs to be successful. Caregivers walked away with a fuller understanding of the same and were also impressed by their student’s ability to articulate that information so clearly without my direct involvement.
One parent tried to cut the student off early saying that they wanted to hear my thoughts rather than the student’s. I assured them I would be happy to answer questions once the student was done. There were none. Conversations resembled discussions around the dining table, rather than the combative confrontations that had occurred in the past.
Now when I tell colleagues that I feel fine about conferences, no acronym is needed.
Bill Velto is an Upper School Social Science teacher, having taught high school in New York, Texas, and North Carolina. Bill enjoys watching all kinds of baseball, cooking, and reading ridiculously dense tomes. He lives with his wife (when she admits it), his son (when he’s in North Carolina and admits it), his daughter (when she’s in North Carolina and admits it), various cats (who admit it when he feeds them treats or has the laser pointer), and a dog (who admits it when he has the leash or a pizza crust). Find him on Twitter @bill_velto.