Student-Led Conferences

It is that time of year for our Parent-Teacher Conferences to begin all across America. Parents, teachers, counselors, administrators, and students are all preparing for this educational tradition. You might wonder how students play into the Parent-Teacher Conference. Well, for Francis Howell Middle, we adopted (many years ago) the Student-Led Conference (SLC) practice; therefore our students are an integral component of our fall (and spring) conferences!

With SLCs our students take an important leadership role. They present their portfolio artifacts to their parents during the conference. The students review assessments, assignment, standardized assessment scores, and other portfolio items with their parents. They explain the scores that they received and offer suggestions to their parents as to ways they can make improvements. The classroom teachers are present and are readily available to discuss any artifact in the portfolio (or to address any other parent questions or concerns). This informal setting and format is quite conducive to increasing communication between school and home.

There are multiple benefits in implementing the SLC format:

• Greater Student Voice
• Increased Oral Communication
• Student Ownership of Portfolio work
• Increased Parent-Student interaction within the conference format

If you haven’t tried this format, I suggest you look into it. Let me know how it works out for your school community!

B, D, O, and Y

These four letters, independent of one another, merely represent letters of the alphabet or perhaps members of the “used letter board” on Wheel of Fortune. However, when correctly manipulated they create an acronym that represents how you can dramatically change your school culture and climate. I am referring to BYOD (Bring Your Own Device)! Last spring our school took that giant step and adopted the Bring Your Own Device policy for the start of this school year. I applaud my staff and parents for encouraging and implementing this best practice. We’ve dabbled in allowing students to use their own devices during the past few years and today students are engaged in multiple levels of personal application: Cellphones, iPods, iPads, Chromebooks, Kindles, and Nooks. They are being challenged and in return they also challenge us (to take our game to the next level so speak). This is an exciting time to be leading out educational change.

Here’s a sampling of resources, apps, and other avenues that the students can access while in school:

·         Remind 101

·         Instagram

·         Twitter

·         Blogging

·         PicStitch

·         Schoology

·         Google Drive

·         Prezi

·         eBooks

·         Socrative

So, as we continue this journey together I look forward to learning new advancements from my staff, students, and my Professional Learning Network (PLN). Why is application and use of technology and best practices so vital today?  Well, simply stated, we’re preparing students today for jobs that do not even exist. As a result we must engage them in the every changing features of technology and academic support to best prepare them to ‘boldly go where no one has gone before.”