Parent-Teacher Conferences
Attended my first ever Parent-Teacher conferences today!
The school I’m student teaching at does conferences in a way I’ve never seen or heard of before.
Pretty much, all teachers can request a conference with parents and vice versa. Then a master copy is made of times with the students and parents names on it and it gets emailed to all teachers.
If, say, a student named John had a conference, then they go to a designated classroom and all teachers that have John attend as well. They kind of do a round robin conference. It works because all 7th grade teachers can see what students show up and if they are having problems with that student than they attend that conference at that certain time. So the parents and student sit at a table and all his teachers take the other half and one-by-one they will share the students’ success and what they need to improve on. Since the community of the school is strong it lets the parents know that all of the teachers back each other up, and it also makes the teachers aware of the students work load and why he/she might be failing, etc.
If a teacher happens to have two students scheduled at the same time, they would simply just talk first, and then hop to the next meeting.
I really like the way this was done because it went really quickly and smoothly!
I attended three and what I learned was that some teacher’s delivery speech of what the child was having problems in could be harsh. It definitely makes me aware of how I would phrase and word things.
I am shocked though at how many parents declined requests or didn’t schedule at all. These kids can be sneaky! I know I was, I hid all kinds of bad grades from my parents in middle school and totally got away with it! Haha But I understand schedule conflicts and time can be difficult.
Other than that, it was an illuminating experience! No school tomorrow for us since there will be parent-teacher conferences from 8 until 12!
