Benefits of Student-Led Conferences

This week's article summary is from a Mindshift blog entitled Why Students Should Take the Lead in Parent-Teacher Conferences. 

Trinity has been doing student-led conferences in UED for a number of years now.

Still kids, teachers, and parents need support and guidance in the whys and hows of conferences with kids. 

For Trinity, the macro goal is to empower students in their learning and to support them in their assessment of their work and effort.

Not just including but giving kids a lead role in a conference helps students feel more in control of their learning and respected for their performance, progress, attitude, and even metacognition!

Joe

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A particularly vivid example of putting students in the driver’s seat of their own education is the way they handle what traditional schools refer to as parent-teacher conferences.

At these time-honored encounters, it’s not uncommon for students to stay home while the adults discuss their progress or lack thereof.

But at some schools the meetings are often turned into student-led conferences, with students presenting their schoolwork, while their teachers, having helped them prepare, sit across the table, or even off to the side.

The triad then sits together to review and discuss the work and the student’s progress. The message, once again, is that the students are responsible for their own success.

While a students’ first impulse is to tear through folders to find every best thing that they have done to show their parents, teachers should encourages students to reflect on the connection between the effort they have made and the quality of their work. One possibility is to have them choose three examples that help them tell their parents a deeper story: one that shows they have recognized both a personal strength and an area in which they are struggling. Most students have never thought about their learning in this way. Nor have most of their parents.

Many parents need some time to adjust to the new format. Often a parent just wants to ask about how their child is doing, or how they are behaving. Sometimes a teacher may need to nudge the conversation back to let the child lead.

Eventually most parents come to realize that report cards don’t tell them anything very useful, and over time, they begin to set a higher bar for their students at these conferences.