PT Conference Reflection

I had the nerve-wracking pleasure of participating in my first set of parent-teacher conferences at Ridge Street. Overall, the experience was a positive one, but there were definitely some important lessons that I learned about preparation and cultural awareness that I hadn't deeply considered prior to the conferences.

First, preparation is key. Mrs. Comesanas has a binder in which she keeps all her printed online assessment tool reports (DRA/Slosson scores, previous year reports, individual and group reports) so that she is ready to tell a parent where a student fell relative to his or her personal progress, progress relative to that of his or her peer's in this year's class, and progress relative to benchmark targets. She was comfortable with locating data on the students on command, so clearly she knows how to manage the online data. She also had anecdotal notes for each student and other comments prepared. These were all things I would want to emulate in my practice as a teacher.

I was able to participate in some of the preparation as well. In fact, Mrs. Comesanas entrusted me with recording detailed notes on each student's reading log, because my notes became a focal point of her conferences when she discussed literacy with her students. I took notes on the kinds of books our students were reading, whether there was a good variety, whether they seemed to be spending too much time on a particular book or repeating books frequently without additional insight in their notes, as well as the quality of their writing in the reading logs. As I wrote down the notes, I paused to consider what a wonderful assessment tool reading logs are for all the skills mentioned above, and more! I think that a reading log will be something I will try to incorporate as a daily homework assignment. In addition to motivating students to read, requiring parental signatures also creates an additional ability to dialogue with parents and feel like you're communicating with them, and ensuring that parents are forced to be interested in their students' learning and work.

One challenge that came up was with Spanish language. While I was able to understand the content of each conference, it was difficult for me to get heavily involved in them because my ability to speak Spanish has not caught up to my ability to understand it. I had let my Spanish studies fall off my radar for a while when I learned early in the year how  much Spanish my students actually spoke. Our one L2 student left the class at the end of October, so since then I've spoken very little Spanish to my students because our language of instruction is always English. What I didn't consider was that my students' English would be SO much stronger than that of their parents, which meant I did not prepare Spanish comments for the parents in advance. Knowing this might be a challenge even in a non-ELL classroom next year, I think one change I will make with my own conferences will be to write comments in Spanish ahead of time, because it will give me a crutch to lean on when making comments and will give parents something to refer to without having to rely on my broken or inadequate Spanish. A good lesson learned!

I also had a bit of an awkward moment with the one conference I was asked to hold on my own with the parent of the student whom I studied for my literacy child study. I looked over his scores and my log notes, but I didn't really know all of his grades off the top of my head. Unfortunately, this caused me to give serious pause when I moved to discuss the grades and saw that Angel was failing math. I did not remember that his grade was an "F" and thus was very nervous explaining to a parent that her son was having serious struggles in a major subject area. I did adapt well on the spot, because I do know Angel well and was able to explain that his math struggles were largely a result of his literacy struggles, and so to improve on his math grade I would focus heavily on his reading skills to enable him to read directions, solve word problems, and execute exemplars. The lesson I took from this was two-fold: have my own set of notes with my students' grades independent of his/her report card, and review them before each conference, even if that means asking the parent to wait while I gather my thoughts; and, it is a good thing I know my students well because it meant the difference between appearing a little nervous and appearing a lot incompetent.

Lastly, it was very interesting to see the difference between student behavior during class and behavior with a parent present. Our most jovial students looked nervous and stone-faced, and I felt really bad that a discussion that was aimed at helping them was causing them so much stress and anguish. We had a student break down and cry because she wasn't getting "A's" (Mrs. C told me that her father had probably set unreasonably high expectations of her and she hadn't met them). Other students looked really sad when their struggles were discussed, but we always included them in those discussions and let them know that our goal was to help them, not to let them keep earning bad grades. Once we calmed students down, set clear expectations and a plan of action to help them moving forward, their demeanor improved across the board.

In conclusion, there was a lot that I learned at each stage of the conference- preparation, execution with the parent, and including students in dialogue about their learning- that I hope to take with me when I prepare for my own set of conferences next year. It was much different from last year's conferences, where I sat across the room as a silent and for the most part invisible observer. There was no escaping the eyes or questions of concerned parents. Luckily, they seemed to have full confidence in both my and Mrs. Comesanas' insights and were willing to work with us to help their students continue learning. Also, I learned that bilingual classes always have perfect or near perfect parent attendance at these conferences, which speaks to the importance of education and parental involvement as a matter of home culture. We had at least one parent attend for each of our 14 students!