Thanksgiving Week
The internet has been down so I am very late getting this posted. If you have time, I'd like the three of you to interact about conferencing, how you feel it went and what you learned for when you are responsible for conferencing on your own.
posted by Chris @ 3:22 PM
5 comments
5 Comments:
Our conferences went very well I thought. The way we handle it in the 8th grade is we e-mail the parents of the kids we feel a conference would do the most good. We give these parents the option of choosing a 15 minute time slot should they respond. And they have meetings with all four teachers at the same time. The rest of the time we have open conferencing, meaning any parent can come in and check on the status of their children. For the most part, these parents were the parents of kids with over 100 percent in our class, but it was still good to hear how we could push these students further.
I was really disappointed by how few parents showed up, especially the ones we emailed. We encouraged the students prior to conferencing to come to their conference, and many would have benefited from hearing what we had to say. However, they didn't show. Out of 86 kids, 14 showed.
As far as the conferencing went, I really learned a lot from Patricia about how to phrase things. She warned me that the comments we put on their report cards would come back to us, and they did. But she had a way of turning the comment around to something positive. For instance if the comment was the child talks excessively, she said, "It is okay to make jokes in class, as long as it is intelligent humor." And she would challenge them to make her laugh during class in an intelligent way.
We only had one bad conference, and the reason it went bad was because the teacher started off with a negative comment instead of a positive one. It really opened up my eyes to how careful you have to tread. These are their babies we are talking about, and we have to be mindful of that.
Conferencing – Well here is a link to a clip from “Airplane” that my mentor teacher sent me. This clips sums up what we felt like after conferences. We have all the 9th grade class so 64 students and then a 10th grade class. When you have all the 9th graders (especially in a school such as this), and it is English, all the parents come. We only had five students who didn’t come or their parents didn’t come. That is a small number. Anyways with the new grading scale (1-7) it has caused a lot of confusion amongst, students, parents, and teachers. I feel like my mentor teacher and I have really geared our rubrics to making it very clear how to achieve each number on the scale. Seven’s are very rare and are given sparingly if given at all. The parents, or at least four main ones, were shocked with their student’s grade. Coming from 8th grade, where they were receiving 90’s and are only “meeting standard” in our class. To sum it up, there were a lot of heated discussions (if you can call it that) one after another. A majority of the parents were great and not a problem, but having a handful of parents who came with the sole purpose to attack and not listen (also gossiping with the other moms) tainted the evening and exhausted us beyond belief. From 12 until 8, with the exception of a half hour break for dinner, we had parents in line—nonstop. I did at least half of the talking, and in a lot of cases most of the talking. Looking back, I feel like I handled myself well, and I was always able to remain calm. I think this skill will help me face any confrontation in the future. The experience also helped me realize the importance of keeping all evidence of emails, school work, etc. on hand and even write written records of conversations (Katie has modeled this for me) so that you can always back up your grades and observations. Sometimes it is important to just move on. Not dwell on the conferences or confrontations and get back up. I think I learned that also, because once some parents ran out of arguments or attacks then they would question why there are “two” teachers, and attack that fact. I actually never felt like they were attacking me in particular, because I could see they didn’t have anything to back up their confrontation.
Don’t worry, I had some great conferences too and even parents wishing I could stay longer. That is always nice to hear…
Emily-I completely agree with the importance of wording things towards parents. As the night went on I had come up with a system that worked pretty well. First talking about what we were doing, and then their strengths, finishing with ways we can help improve the students work, or attitude in class. It is also helpful to talk about any growths that have been accomplished and mention what still needs worked on.
It is interesting the number of parents that showed compared to the international school. I was originally wishing that some parents hadn't showed haha, but in the grand scheme of things...my thoughts were wrong.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOU7rWbc4Qo - - The line of people waiting to "help" the passenger represents the parents.
EEEK. I am sorry this is so late! In reference to conferencing, I was so thankful to be a part of them to see how they operate. In elementary classrooms, it has a lot to do with preparing student portfolios and letting the portfolio really guide the teacher through the conference. My mentor teacher also made a great point that she keeps the portfolios all year as a snapshot of the students' work for parents. Additionally, the portfolios can be used as evidence for students to be referred to Special Ed or Gifted Education.
The parents for the most part were pretty happy with how their child was doing as well as with the class. We had a conference we were dreading because the student is very unmotivated and doesn't work up to his potential, but apparently the student has the same issues at home.
My mentor teacher gets kind of nervous with conferences so I handled the social aspect of the children and made sure to mention positive things about each student to the parents. We made a very good team!
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