Better Conversations About Student Progress
The promise of spring weather brings for many the perennial promise of parent-teacher conferences. Parent-teacher conferences inevitably raise the cortisol levels of the teachers preparing their reflections and thoughtfully considering how to share what they’ve learned from the unique lens formed from spending days on end with young learners. Teachers may ask themselves:
What do I know about this student and their islands of competence as well as their social, emotional, and academic needs?
What are my concerns about this student and their journey across these same facets as they develop?
How will I share my reflections and concerns about students? How will their grown-ups respond?
And hopefully, what are my blind spots? What am I missing? What can a parent or guardian share? How can we collaborate?
And possibly even, what was I thinking when I took on this teaching enterprise anyway? What’s the square footage of my parent’s basement again?
And regrettably, maybe, did Sara share that story about when I abandoned the writing lesson for the long-winded story about the mystical landmine phone? For all readers, let’s take a collective moment to acknowledge that teaching is truly the stuff of courage, vulnerability, and (sometimes) misguided and tangental folklore for an audience of 24 (see again, vulnerability).
The parent-teacher conference experience can be fraught for parents as well. Parents raise questions like:
How well is my student doing in [insert content area here]?
Is my student reading at grade level?
What are you doing to challenge my student?
I love [insert content area]. What are you doing to help my child also love [insert content area here]?
My student only wants to read graphic novels. What are you going to do about that? (Stay tuned for a future post on this topic, but for now I recommend you click here or here if this is causing you a source of stress—spoiler alert: there are expert-supported reasons to cross this worry off your list).
The scope of this blog post doesn’t purport to give these questions equal or sufficient attention. They’re fodder for spin off posts to be sure. For the blog at hand: the winter solstice is behind us and spring is (more or less) flirting with the idea of commencing. So, about those conferences! Allow me to offer some tips and questions to anchor better conversations about student progress for this generation of students who have endured a pandemic unlike anything in our adult memories. Many of us can conjure up that image of a landline phone, but a pandemic? There’s not a roadmap. As a result, for us as adults, many have gone up in pant size, questioned and reconfigured relationships in the unrelenting crucibles of mid- and post-lockdown, made existential shifts after this whole thing put a spotlight on the fragility of our days. We’ve navigated Loss and loss, and we all carry the concentric circles of individual and collective trauma like rings in a tree. So do our children and students. We know for sure that many students from K - 12 through college are facing mental health crises. The signs can be acute, or they can be disturbingly unclear—the untold depth and sharpness of the crises hidden like the taunting preview of an iceberg. So if we come together as educators and adults in care of young students, what are some guiding ideas and questions we can rally around?
Center the conversation on curiosity. What’s happening for [student] right now? I’ve noticed….what do you see?
Take a wide lens. What is going well for [student] in, out, and around the classroom? What are you smiling about? What are you wondering or worried about?
Push the content-specific agendas to the side…just try it for a moment. What makes them engage and wonder? Then, map this onto areas of concern. Is there a more clear pathway to support the student now?
Rally behind shared, collaborative, and measurable goal(s). What do you want for [student] this year? What is your role? What is my role? How will we know if we succeeded?
Be candid about mental health concerns. Given the state of the current student mental health landscape, check in with candor. Are there tears, withdrawal, intense worries or fears interfering with daily activities, or other warning signs? Educators are often the first to notice some of these difficulties and concerns. Consider the value of cultivating conversations at home that are wide enough to contain the things about school that are not for everyone, not always pleasant, and not always easy—-especially for those students for whom hunkering down at home with their people and behind their screens was a salve, and they haven’t quite figured out how to be in the relative chaos or develop the stamina to be with 25+ people at a time throughout the day.
Celebrate. I’m really proud that [student]… Take the win. Share what the wins look like at home and in school.
Now, perhaps more than ever, these conversations are difficult, murky, and fraught. We’ll do them imperfectly, to be sure. But let’s also do them widely, with curiosity and the bravery required as we carry on to help our students and each other be seen and supported.
Image credit: Photo by Fröken Fokus: https://www.pexels.com/photo/person-jumping-photo-127968/