What parents don’t want to hear at parent-teacher conferences
When my wife and I sat down at our daughter’s 5th grade parent-teacher conference last week, we hoped to get a sense that the teacher understood our daughter and her strengths and weaknesses. But we didn’t.
Instead, the teacher provided us with a litany of numbers and test results the school and the education-testing industry use to define our daughter and her education.
We learned that our daughter is expected to read 8 words per minute faster than she currently is. We learned that she scored a 208 on some test she was predicted to have scored a 210 on and that she will hopefully score a 214 on this test by the end of the school year. We learned about some other test results, some of which my daughter did well on and some of which she didn’t, none of which I remember because they didn’t tell me anything meaningful about my daughter’s experience or education.
Every year at parent-teacher conferences, it’s been the same –– we’ve been handed sheets of paper detailing her reading fluency as measured in words per minute, and every year we’ve been told that she needs to read faster to reach the goal for her grade level. Yet every night when I read with my daughter, the things I love the best are when she interrupts me and asks what a word means, when she reacts and responds to what she’s read, when she wants to know why something happened, when we go slow and understand.
Never once have we paid attention to the speed at which she’s reading.
Over the years at parent-teacher conferences, I’ve seen far too many charts and graphs of standardized test scores, percentile rankings, predictions for future test results. If I want anything out of my daughter’s fifth grade year, it’s that she end the year more excited and passionate and confident than when she began it. (She’s not.) I’m not interested in seeing charts that align class activities with “state outcomes” and whether or not my daughter’s progress is meeting some bureaucrat’s idea of success.
The data-driven focus of education today creates a dangerous lock-step assembly line approach to education where students’ passions and interests are ignored. If we set out to deliberately create the most damaging educational system we could, it wouldn’t look much different than today’s system.
I write this as someone who is not just a parent, but who has been a teacher for 20 years. I don’t fully blame my daughter’s teachers –– I understand why teachers do conferences like this, why they show parents charts and graphs and lists of scores. It’s easier. And it’s expected. And it fits into all the covert messages schools send teachers about what really matters: the data and the test results.
As a high school teacher, I used to show parents test results and quiz scores as soon as they sat down at the conference table. Six years ago, another teacher challenged me to stop talking about grades at conferences. She advised me to find out what the parents’ concerns are, to share my observations, and to make the conferences about the experiences the students are having in my class. Since I took this advice, conferences are a better experience for the parents and for me as the teacher. Here’s some data for you: during these conferences, fewer than two percent of parents have asked me what grade their student is getting.
What I want for my daughter are teachers and a school that will recognize her weaknesses and strengths (even if those strengths aren’t “measurable”), that will work with her on what she needs, and that will not reduce her education into a chart or a graph or some predefined outcome created by bureaucrats and small-minded government officials.
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I couldn’t agree more. Interestingly, I have also been teaching high school for 20 years (well, perhaps a couple of years longer), and we have a son who is in fifth grade. And, actually, we haven’t had a teacher conference with his teacher this year, but I imagine if we did have a conference that we would hear much the same. And it’s not so much the teacher’s fault that the conference would proceed in this manner as it is the expectation that the teacher has that this is what she *should* share with us.
Really, I think it comes down to the fact that the teacher can choose otherwise if the teacher so wishes. (Not so easy for a young teacher, perhaps, who thinks that this is what he or she *must* do, but this should be easier for a more veteran teacher who isn’t so fearful about deviating from what the perceived norm should be perhaps.)
It is good to be reminded that parents don’t want to be fed a litany of numbers in a conference with their child’s teacher — at any grade level. These individuals we teach are all children of parents who love their children and want to hear stories that validate the best in their child and inspire hope for growth in their child. Numbers/data do none of this.
I have been just as guilty as your child’s fifth-grade teacher over the years, Jason. When I meet with a parent, I usually first show them a print-out of the child’s grade, which of course is just a bunch of numbers. I need to remember how I would react to that if I were that child’s parents.
For, in the end, after however long the conference has lasted, the parent(s) and I have actually spent very little time talking about the data and much more time talking about the child — how they are spending their time outside of school, what other commitments they have, how they are getting along with their peers and other adults, what they are interested in, what they hope to do when they graduate.
Thank you for your thoughtful post.
Jason, I’m a parent and teacher too. Thank you for your thoughtful comments about parent conferences. As a parent, I have always wondered why teachers show us all those test scores–I never felt it told me anything about my son as a student. As a teacher–I conduct student-led conferences. My students (fourth grade) meet with their parents first and perform a set of tasks. They read to them from a grade-level passage, solve a math problem, show them a writing sample, and maybe perform a science experiment or place a country on a map. By the time they are finished, the parents already know how their child is doing. Our conferences are focused on what’s working well for their child and how to best serve the child’s needs. By the way, my students rehearse for the conference the week prior so they feel well-prepared!
Excellent way of helping students prepare for the real/adult world! Presentations are a regular part of most adult’s work experience and what a great way to learn how to prepare and lead one!
I am in my 11th year and I have taught 1st, 2nd, 4th and 6th grade. In my last district we had a conference day on which to schedule every parent a 15 min time slot. I tried that the first few years, but quickly realized I spent too much time apologizing for running late. I couldn’t have a meaningful conference in a 15 min slot. So I began scheduling each with a 10-20 min cushion of time built in before and after. This helped because I like to simply get real and talk to parents.
I do share the cold hard data with them, in a parent-friendly chart or graph that I show at the very end for about a minute or two. In addition, I interpret the information for parents and give them a couple suggestions of what they can do at home to either increase or maintain current scores. Like if a student is low in fluency I suggest parents encourage their child to pick a favorite book and allow them to read it over and over so they can focus on speed and reading smoothly instead of decoding words. I also send the charts or graphs home with the parents so they can look at it more later.
So back to the best part of my conferences…I began to think about what I wanted to hear as a parent from my child’s teachers and I started to spend the majority of my conferences sharing those things about my students. I would start with something like, “so tell me how you have encouraged your child to be such an incredible scientist!” Or “I bet your time at home is full of laughs because your little guy has the most clever sense of humor!” As soon as parents realize I really have gotten to know their child and I love him/her, they open up and share so much! THAT is what I am really after!! Just an open and honest conversation about the different things that make that child who he/she is can help me tremendously as I listen to ways I can better reach them. Who better to learn from than their parents?!! I also make sure to allow time for parents to ask any questions they have or share any concerns. But def not until I have spent most of our time showing them how much I care. Because my pastor has a saying he uses often “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” I find that everything else I share in the last minutes of our time together makes a lot more difference if I have opened the lines of communication with the stuff they want to hear first. And really, most parents don’t need you to sugar coat everything, most know their darling isn’t without his/her flaws. They really just want to know that the person caring for their beloved child truly cares and actually knows him/her, flaws and all. I think really, they want to know I love their child. The best way I can show that is to share all that I have taken the time to learn about that individual.
Data and test scores have their place, but they are empty and useless if a parent doesn’t know you care about their child. And really, teaching is pretty useless, too, when given to a child that doesn’t feel cared for and safe with the teacher. But I have watched my students scores over the years and actually, the data proves that relationships have to come first. Once my students know how much I care, they are a lot more eager to care about all I know and want to teach them. I think it just speaks to the human condition. We all want to be loved. We all want to be cared for. We can all learn, and do it best when we know first that we are loved. I guess the gist of all this is that parent conferences will be more meaningful when we remember these same principles that work in the classroom.
The attached article speaks about a continuing emerging trend in education and a major problem many know exists. Here is one of things I used to do as a parent to counter this trend when I would meet Sage’s teachers at high school parent-teacher conferences: When her teachers would immediately show me her scores and review some of the curriculum being covered, I would politely respond, “I can see this on internet and you showed me your class syllabus during the “back to school night”. What I would like to hear from you is a story about Sage in your class. Tell me something that happened with her that you remember—something about how she treats her fellow students or how she interacts with you. And finally, tell me the first word that comes to your mind when you think of Sage.” After telling me no parent usually asks them such a thing, they think for a moment and share a story or two and a descriptive word! I would write down the list of seven words (from her seven teachers) and go home and share the list of words with Sage and ask her if she could guess which teachers said which words. She rarely got them all right and quite often she would be pleasantly surprised to hear such feedback.
I disagree on only two points. 1) it’s not easier, or just “expected”, to base everything off test data: it’s usually REQUIRED. 2) the message from admin that data is what really matters is not covert, at least around here: test results are all that matters.
I think it’s fair to say that parents often do not realize the extent of administration’s and central office’s complete and total disinterest in anything other than test scores.
Please know that your teachers would love nothing more than what you have described. We feel bound and tied by all the mandates thrown at us, but our forced use of data for the sake of data, and having less and less time to actually get to know our students. The politicians don’t listen to us, however. It will take parents standing up to them to get them to back off and let us teachers do what is best. Until that happens, we are nothing more than cogs in the standardized education wheel. Personally, I wish I could remove my own kids and homeschool. It’s maddening.
It would be wonderful if we didn’t have to worry about the test scores. Unfortunately, in this age of accountability, test scores DO matter. In fact, it’s what a large part of our evaluations (which decide whether or not we keep our jobs) are based on these days. I do believe it will take parents standing up to not just administrators but to the bureaucrats and telling them that they’ve had enough. Tell them that your children aren’t numbers or test scores. Tell them that you want teachers to have the freedom to teach each child, not just a list of standards and sometimes unobtainable goals. Tell them that you want our children to be able to do independent projects and not just follow a now nation wide mandated curriculum.
I loved teaching and working with students. By the way, they are people, not numbers. My job was to make them excited to learn, to stretch themselves, and hopefully encourage them to leave the world a better place because they were in it. Building their confidence and self-esteem comes from caring, loving, learning, and encouraging. We destroy with numbers and benchmarks that don’t even mean much in the “real world.” I would be fired if I was still teaching.
I love this message, but many parents do expect the conference to be about grades and test scores. Also, we are required to bring these things to conferences. It really would be lovely to have a conference where the parents want to know how well we know their kids and their interests, but they are either about their grades or their behavior and how to make sure they improve in these areas.
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[…] Although not everything in these two blog posts applies to us, they are great reminders for us to remember P/T conferences from a parent’s perspective. Check them out if you have time before next week: 5 Thing Parents Wish Teachers Knew for Conferences and What Parents Don’t Want to Hear. […]