Day 41: Student Led Conferences

Agenda-
Student Led Conferences
Today there weren’t any classes as all of the homeroom teachers were being required to hold student led conferences. Meg ran the conferences I observed and worked on my Night and Aurora Leigh units. I figured out what I want to require for both and created a rubric for the poetry portfolio. The conferences went fairly well. You could tell that the students that were doing the best were the ones whose parents were the most involved. The students who were failing had parents who had no idea what was going on at school. However, they really seemed to care that their students do well. They were all disappointed that their child wasn’t doing well. All of the conferences went fairly well. The parents liked knowing how their student was doing and liked the feedback on how their child could do better. One conference I was especially impressed with the parent. Meg told her that her son was very smart but that from what she can tell he is just bored and that is why he isn’t doing so well. The parent liked hearing that and agreed her son could do much better. Then Meg started talking about summer school as an option for making up failed classes. And mom said “You’ll be paying for that.” All I could think was, “Go, mom!” Maybe if more parents made their kids pay for summer school they would be more reluctant to go. One student and parent didn’t show up. This particular student is not doing well and tends to get in trouble a lot. It is too bad really that he didn’t come to the conference.