Making the most of parent-teacher conferences

As Joni Mitchell said, "I've seen things from both sides now..."  As a parent and a teacher, I know that conference time is a fraught time for kids, teachers and parents.  In past years I have had to literally run from my school to my children's school to be the parent then I have had to run back to my school in the same day to be the teacher.  The quick change of roles made my head spin a little.

With this in mind, I wanted to post something that my principal emailed to every teacher and every parent.  It is from Michael Thompson and I think it does a very good job of framing conferences to be the best that they can be for all involved.

Making the Best of Parent-Teacher Conferences: Eight Steps to Success for Parents

Michael Thompson, Ph.D., is the author of The Pressured Child: Helping Your Child to Achieve Success in School and in Life, and co-author of Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Lives of Boys.

--Remember the F-word: Focus. The aim of a parent-teacher conference is for adults to build a mutually respectful alliance that will support a child's (sometimes difficult) journey through school. Kids thrive when they feel the adults in their lives see them in the same way. Parents and teachers should try to use the precious minutes of a conference to reach agreement about a child's strengths and challenges–-and how to respond to each.


--Be there. We expect our children to attend school every day. Research shows that they do better academically when both parents attend conferences. A parental no-show sends a message to a child that maybe school isn't such a high priority, or perhaps that he or she isn't.


--Leave your old school baggage at home. We all have memories of teachers and classes that made us miserable. It's important to set those aside and approach your child's teachers as peers and partners. Assume a teacher wants to see your child succeed in school and life –- just as you do. The respect you show a teacher is contagious and will find its way back to your child.


--Use a report card as a tool, not a centerpiece. Turn any review of grades or other evaluations into an opportunity to ask what's working and what's not for your child, and listen to the teacher's observations. Do not dwell on the grade itself and do not attempt to pressure a teacher to change a grade, especially at a conference (if there is a real issue of injustice, it should be taken to an administrator). Remember, an "A" student won't die from getting a "B," nor will a "B" student suffer irreparable harm from getting a "C." Most of us learned lessons about life and about ourselves from getting lower grades than we wished.


--Share insider information: Tell the teacher what you know about your child as a learner. You've seen plenty. You know what motivates your child, what has worked with teachers in the past, and what your child loves and hates about school. Also, tell your child's teacher about your hopes and fears for your child. All parents worry from the day they send their children off to Kindergarten, and on through high school. No parent ever has all the information they'd like to have about their child's school life. When you articulate your concerns and wishes, it alerts a teacher to something important about your child's life. That information can help a teacher fine-tune instruction or interactions to be more effective for your child.


--Ask about the things that matter most. Go beyond grades. Ask about your child as a citizen of the classroom. Is he or she respectful of adults and other students? Not every child is going to be a brilliant student, but brilliant or not, you want your child to be a loving, respectful, productive citizen who can live in community with others. Ask about your child's social life in school. Ask whether she or he has friends, is part of a group, knows how to socialize and work respectfully with other children. How your child functions with other people is going to make a big difference in later life.


--Ask what you can do. Ask how you can support your child's success without micromanaging or rescuing him or her from mistakes and the valuable lessons they offer.

--Trust your child’s development. Try relaxing a little and having faith in your child’s journey through school.

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Mid-Life Teaching

Midway along the journey of our life I woke to find myself in a dark wood, for I had wandered off from the straight path. - Dante Alighieri

First lines of the Divine Comedy.


Recently I realized that this blog might frustrate a new teacher. She might be looking for what to do tomorrow, how to manage a rowdy class or how to deal with the countless little details of teaching. After eleven years in the teaching business, I find that I have gotten more philosophical about how what I am doing is affecting those I am doing it to.

I have lost the straight path. The answers don't really come easily anymore. I find I like to do things like write blog posts instead of grading lab reports.

However, as a teacher and a hiker, that where the trail ends, the adventure begins. And teaching, thankfully, still feels adventurous.

Tech tools: Twitter in the classroom

Me: "I'll send you an email."
Student: "uh...I don't check my email."
Me: "Ever?"
Student: "Ever. I just delete everything."

Email is sooooooo 2006. At least you would think so if you asked many of my students. Teachers use email and it represents the pinnacle of high tech for many of us. However, an increasing number of students (it was 2 in a group of about 15 in a recent poll of mine) don't really use it. Certainly not for their personal peer-to-peer communication.

Sometimes teaching is about getting others to change. Sometimes it is about changing yourself and the way you do things. I decided to try something different. I am trying to get the students in the club I advise to set up Twitter accounts. This way I can get messages to all of them at once and the messages can "push through" the digital haze into their phones. I will still do email. As a matter of fact the Twitter updates will be sent as emails to the students as well.

If you feel so inclined, answer this question in the comments:

How could you have students use cell phones for your class to learn better, more authentically or more collaboratively?

I actually put my Twitter feed up on this blog (look right.)

It's all just a big experiment....

Tools and Techniques: Google Spreadsheets

I am not a fan of high tech. I am not a fan of low tech. I am a fan of appropriate tech. However, appropriate technology has become more and more difficult to peg. I find myself osscilateing between all and nothing much the way a chronic dieter swings back and forth between celery and cupcakes.

That being said, I have discovered a great Web 2.0 application: Google Spreadsheets. Actually, I have known about it for some time but it took a while for me to use it in my classroom. I had to play with it first and get comfortable myself before trying it on my kids. As a science teacher, I feel very strongly about data. The message I try to pass on to my students is this: more is better.

Google Spreadsheets is one of Google Docs suite of tools that makes pooling the data of a group of students really easy. Primarily because I (the teacher) don't have to do it. They take responsibility for it and get to learn a very simple, very useful tool for online collaboration.

From now on, I think I am going to use it for students to upload their data after every lab. That way they can compare their results to that of the students in all of my classes. It changes the whole idea of an outlier. Instead of one of a group's data points being "off," those students now have a broader perspective as to what is actually in the acceptable range of data.

Caveat: Google spreadsheets can sometimes be a bit buggy. Initially, it kept hanging up. I found that if you refresh the page it eventually works and autosaves to the spreadsheet. In the end, all of my students posted their data without many problems.

Feedback and Critique

This post was inspired by two things. I have to grade papers this weekend. Also, I recently bought a copy of Real Simple magazine and read an article on How To Handle Criticism.

Grading papers is both the most time consuming and the least satisfying part of my job. Maybe I am naive but the inventor in me thinks there has to be a better way. I think that about most things, there is always a better, more effective, more efficient and/or more beautiful way to do most common jobs.

I would like to create a protocol or technique for turning grading into a much more collaborative and social enterprise. More Facebook, less rubric. I am not sure how to do this but it would accomplish several different goals.

First, it would be a better educational experience for the student. The giving and receiving of feedback are essential skills and the recognition of quality (in work, in products, in communication, in design, in argument etc.) is very important to internalize. Grading/critique by self and peers (in consultation with me, the teacher) would really facilitate this.

Second, this would make the process of grading more "authentic." Let's face it, most assignments (at least from the perspective of the student) are totally contrived. Try as we may as teachers, I think this will be the way of things in many academic subjects for a while. However, if you know you will have to face up to your own work and hear about it from your peers, that authenticates at least the assessment part of the assignment. I am a middle school teacher and it seems like the social world is all-important to most of my students.

Third, selfishly but not unimportantly, it would reduce a teacher's grading load. How would this benefit the students? Why should they care about this? They may not. However, it would make me (speaking for myself) a happier person, and allow me to devote more time to lesson planning, thinking about teaching, blogging, etc. These are all the creative and intellectual endeavors that drew me to education in the first place. There is nothing that makes a teacher better, in my opinion, than to be a learner. There is a lot of integrity in it and it allows us to empathize with the students.

Brain Rules

In my last post I mentioned a few books that I have been reading. Of these, probably the the one that has had the biggest impact on how I think about teaching has been Brain Rules by John Medina. I think about it as the owner's manual that we were never given on how to operate our own brains.

Medina is not alone in his focus on brain-centered learning practices. Robert Marzano and his colleagues had begun working on research-based practices in the late 80's. However, he breaks down the function of the brain with regard to learning into 12 discreet rules, each of which has huge implications for teachers and learners.

His book states the 12 rules and then goes into detail about each (that's why I am not going to do that here.) Even if you don't want to buy the book, there is a companion website that does a great job of supporting the book with videos and images. The book comes with a DVD that has even more content than that on the site.

Dr. Medina is also interviewed on one of my favorite podcasts, FitnessRocks, by Dr. Monte Ladner and they touch on the effect of exercise on learning.

Here are my personal take home points:

• In the Attention chapter, where I think teachers will get the most bang for their reading buck, he discusses the importance of putting emotional important into his lessons, he does this with stories. However, he breaks up his lectures into 10 minutes segments, beginning each with an emotional hook. His own personal experience as a professor has shown this to be a good interval to work with.
• In the Exercise chapter, he stated that research indicates that exercise actually helps both grow new neurons and new connnections between existing ones. This is a function of the substance BDNF (brain derived neurotropic factor). This is a throwback to our evolutionary past. We evolved as highly mobile, active problem solvers on the savannah of East Africa. The average early human traveled 20 km per day. Our brains thrive under similar stimulation today.

• Medina ends each chapter with a list of "ideas" for real world exploration of the topics in each chapter. I found this feature both interesting and frustrating. While I agree with his desire for more research in these areas, I am a teacher and teachers are very practical people. In a future edition, assuming there has been more research in these areas, perhaps he will include more concrete suggestions.

He mentioned the need for classroom teachers to collaborate with brain researchers to break through to the next level of understanding on these topics.

Is this something you would be interested in?