Conferencing with Students = Communicating with Parents (part 2)

Conferencing With Students =

Communicating with Parents (part 2)

     What is more exciting than conferencing with a struggling reader or perhaps an English Learner and witnessing their continuous effort to become fluent readers?!  In this month’s post, I want to continue talking about how to conference with students using authentic and meaningful data in order for them to articulate this data with their parents!  

Conferencing with students should be meaningful for both teacher and student.  It is an important opportunity to create, strengthen and continue the teacher-student bond that can last for years to come!

I have made an extra effort to use the technology that our district provides such as Renaissance Learning products (Accelerated Reader) in order to meet with students about their reading habits/progress as well as convert these into an opportunity to communicate with their parents.  AR offers lots of reports and I would like to share how I use the word count report with students.  At our school, our Principal has created a “challenge” to all students.  Each grade is challenged to gain a certain amount of AR points within a six-week period.  If students achieve these points, they receive an extra recess as well as a brag tag.  The brag tags have been a great incentive this year as most students really want to collect all six Principal’s Challenge tags for the year!

Each time a student passes an AR quiz, the program adds the total word count of that particular book into the student’s record.  AR allows teachers to run reports within certain time periods to report a particular word count for that time period.  What I like to do is use an informational chart that our principal provided us a few months ago about the impact that reading has on academics.  I decided to create a worksheet (embedding this chart) in order to allow my students to reflect on how they did during the principal’s challenge and what this tells them about their reading habits.  In the video below, you can see how I conferenced with one particular student to help her reflect on her reading.  I also encouraged her to make personal goals for the next challenge.  In the end, she made certain that she would be able to share this information with her mom at home. 

Items to remember during student conferencing:

1.   Keep it simple - try to make data “kid-friendly” but don’t be afraid to use academic vocabulary when reviewing reports.  Kids get it!

2.           Keep it positive - students tend to gravitate towards the “mistakes” so become their cheerleader and their coach by celebrating their progress.

3.           Keep it brief- remember that you have a lot of students and not enough time.  Allocate just a few minutes for each conference...I usually try to keep them under 10 minutes...less is more!  

4.           Keep it reflective - it is more important to me my students understand HOW they learn instead of what they’ve learned.   Questions I try to use over and over: What does this tell you about yourself as a learner?  What goals can you set? Why?

5.           DON’T keep it to yourself - have students share their data home to share with parents.  Parents often mention to me how impressed they are to hear their child articulate details about their performance or progress.  It is exciting to receive this feedback during parent conferences or unexpected emails.

Learning and growing along with my students!

Gus Macuil