Student+Lead+Conferences

Student Lead Conferences, why would we want these? Well, the question is why not. Often in middle school parents have received multiple conference invitations prior to the one or two days in November "assigned" for meetings. With team time and discussions, middle school teams do not wait until these late fall dates to build relationships with parents. For students who are excelling, we have sent a progress reports, report cards and often have been in direct communication with these parents as well. By reworking the Conference days to Student Lead (or involved) days, we encourage our middle school model to work effectively.

Not to mention, many of our schools have outgrown the times alloted for these allotted face to face conferences thus forcing us to regulate parents to 10 -15 directive conferences that tend to be harried and can further exasperate the situation.

SLC's or SIC's allow us to turn the focus of the conference to child and their progress. Parents are often amazed at their child's ability to articulate their learning as well as the evidence of the work they have accomplished. The format used at Shanghai American School, Pudong Campus allows for 350 parents and students to meet with their child and discuss goal setting, evidence of the essential learning (EAGLES), and student exemplars in a 30 minute conference. This includes the specialists as well as the core and provides a window of time for parents to meet with individual teachers at their leisure. Attached are some documents and rationale for conducting SLC's with your students.

ISS are looking at bringing this in to the MS next academic year. It is undertaken extremely successfully in our Elementary School. It may also set up some ideal strategies in preparation for the MYP Personal Project in Grade 10. Questions - do schools generally take the day off timetable to run these? What format do these take (e.g. digital, paper based)? These questions tend to be discussed regularly but schools are constantly finding new things that work. If anyone in smaller schools has a fantastic idea that they would be happy to share I’d love to hear it. Thanks! Also - we currently report quarterly - which is a lot of writing! Has anyone tried this or do you forsee any problems with reducing the reporting to 3 periods by having the conferences instead? Considering March as conference time....

KIS had SLCs two years ago and then the new principal went away from them. He went to a traditional horse shoe conference in the gym. The parents were very pleased with this because they got to meet with all of their teachers. But the student involvement was lacking. So I'm currently struggling with do I go back to SLCs and the growing pains with the parents about understanding SLCs or remain in the traditional conference format. Our population wants to meet with the teachers and not with their sons and daugthers! One idea was to add the advisory teacher to the list of teachers they need to visit during the conferences and do a 5 minute student presentation of their work. As anyone included SLCs in this way before? Robin Schneider Korea International School