Zak's Weekly Musings (September 26, 2023)

According to Wang et al. (1994), the school-home partnership is the fourth most influential factor on student learning of the 28 factors studied in their groundbreaking meta-analysis. 

Parent-Teacher Conferences present us with a prime – perhaps even the best – opportunity to harness and amplify this influence.

So, what can we do to realize the potential of conferences? It all starts with us doing something about the power imbalance that exists between us and our students’ parents.

A 2011 study found that 52% of parents want to be more involved in supporting their child’s education, but find the prospect daunting. According to this same study, when parents enter a teacher’s classroom, they become “nervously aware of their own amateur status.”

This is equally true for independent school parents. As Michael Thompson writes, “For parents, there is nothing more precious or more important than their child. They come to conferences eager, often desperate, to hear good news about their child’s life in school.”

To bridge and fortify the home-school partnership during conferences, we must create an environment of mutual respect and understanding, empowering parents as equal partners in their child’s education.

Fortunately, doing so takes very little additional effort. In fact, you can do so by inserting one of just three questions into your conference structure:

My advice is to divide your conference into three parts:

  1. Open by providing an overview of your course, highlighting what the class has done up to this point in the year and what you’ll be doing for the remainder of the year.

  2. Transition to speaking about the student. A seamless segway into this conversation would be to flatten power dynamics by inviting parents into the fold of the discussion: 

    • “I care deeply about the success of your child. What should I know that may be helpful in supporting your child’s success?” 

    • “What has been successful for your child in the past?”

    • “Nobody knows your child better than you do. What do you know about your child that I should know?”

  3. Once parents provide their insights, discuss one glow, one grow, and potentially one goal for the student, framing these through the lens of Learning Habits or your specific reporting outcomes.

A simple structure and a simple question can make all the difference in cultivating a productive partnership for the remainder of the year. 

Several Important Reminders

  1. In addition to asking questions, another way for us to show that we are investing in that home-school partnership is to be candid and evidence-based. In speaking with a parent earlier in the year, she shared that the anonymized teacher report she read in her child’s psycho-ed was completely different from the glowing reports she had received from teachers during conferences last year. This shouldn’t be the case. This disconnect between what we’ll say to a parent vs. around a parent erodes trust and negatively impacts the home-school partnership. The strength of this partnership isn’t built on our being pollyannaish, but about being truthful and, importantly, evidence-based. 

  2. Of course, parent-teacher conferences cannot be exclusively conversational. You will need to share information about each child’s learning. With Progress Reports on the horizon, I would encourage you to structure your conferences by sharing a glow, grow, and goal, with each anchored to either your reporting outcomes or the Learning Habits. This way, when you write reports for Q.1, much of your work is already started. 

  3. Finally, and just as a reminder, there is language that needs to be avoided. This includes those things that are tangential to learning and for which we do not have evidence. An example of this would be words like “nice, ”“shy,” or “quiet.” Other language that we will want to avoid revolves around that of the fixed mindset, including words like “smart” or “bright.” Keep your language consistent with that of the growth mindset.

  4. Not all conversations will go as we might have hoped. If you have a difficult parent interaction, be sure to alert an administrator. See the difficult interaction as a puzzle to be solved or an opportunity to grow. Even with a difficult interaction, reflect on what you might have learned from the conversation about your student. If you anticipate a difficult conversation, please send me a Calendar invite now, so I can block that time off and be present. 

We are all in this together for our students. I hope your conferences are productive and useful to you, the parents/guardians, and the students.