Parent-Teacher Conferences

Having just finished another two days of Parent-Teacher conferences, following basically the same one of two formats I've used over the last 15 years in four different school systems, I find myself thinking: are they SO last century? And the "they" is the conferences, not the parents or teachers or students. The more and more my students are using technology, the more and more parents could be checking out their kids' work anytime they feel like it. My school, ISB, uses PowerSchool, so parents can get an as-up-to-date-as-the-teacher-has-bothered view of their kids' progress. And one of the best features of PowerSchool is the ability for me, the teacher, to write an individual comment to an individual student about an individual assignment that only the student and his parents can view. So, for a teacher like me who actively and regularly uses PowerSchool, when parent-teacher conferences roll around or report card time comes, there are no unpleasant (or pleasant, for that matter) surprises in the grade department.

While face time with parents and students together is nice (and OK, I should have been refering to these conferences all along as "student-led conferences" or "parent/teacher/student/but/not/necessarily/in/that/order/conferences", it seems like more and more the feedback I hear from parents is along the lines of, "Oh, it's nice to see where my kid spends a chunk of his time everyday" or simply to put my face to a serious of dinner-table stories. Much of the "how's she doing?" is an on-going virtual dialogue composed of voices from the class wiki, the students' blogs, PowerSchool, my emails, etc.

With so much information about a student's performace readily available to parents, it seems increasingly unlikely that any surprises might take place at these semi-annual parent conferences.