How to Successfully Institute Student-Led Conferences at Your School
A middle school principal on how teachers, students, and families have benefited from an initiative that guides students to take ownership of their learning.
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When my daughters get home from school, I can’t help myself: I have to ask about their day. Every parent intuitively knows the response to this question. “It was good,” “It was fine,” or something else in that ballpark.
As a middle school principal who works in a different district from the one my daughters attend, I’m especially interested in what other students’ days look like. I want to know which activities their teachers have planned for them, the strategies employed at their school, and, most important, how my daughters perceive their overall academic experience.
When I first heard about student-led conferencing, it was through another building within my district. Initially, I considered the concept from the perspective of a dad. I knew that I would relish hearing directly from my girls about their progress in school. I decided to implement student-led conferencing in my own building, and it’s worked even better than I could have imagined.
Shifting the responsibility of preparing for, and executing, a conference from teachers to students has produced a significant increase in parental involvement. It’s also led to more student ownership of their learning and encouraged a shared understanding of the factors that go into ensuring academic success for everyone. Our students have started to see school less as something they have to get through, and more as an opportunity to grow and mature.
Starting the Conference Process
To kick off this initiative, the leadership team at my school reached out to other school leaders who had already adopted a student-centered approach to their conferences. Discussions between our team and the leadership groups at other schools revealed similarities for us to model. Those schools have an adult as a point person for students to help collect and organize materials. We observed that students also create a central portfolio that houses materials displayed during the conference itself. School leaders create and share a calendar for staff members with benchmark dates leading up to the conference to ensure that all students and staff are completing necessary tasks and keeping a standard pace.
Once we accumulated these tips, our next step was to meet as an instructional leadership team to review what we had learned and come up with our own itinerary.
We planned for the entire conference process to take roughly one month. Staff received a calendar with benchmark dates. Students were given a brief presentation and overview, including a mock exemplar to help conceptualize the end product. Students were excited to speak for themselves and showcase their learning to a family member. We told students their parents and caretakers would be invited into the building at the end of the month so they could go over their portfolio.
Student-Led Reflections
The portfolio that students use to guide their conference is typically created in an organized binder.
The binder begins with an “identity piece.” This is a short writing activity where students share about themselves as learners and, more generally, as young people. The idea of self-reflection is a significant driving force of the student-led conference—it’s something we repeatedly instill. Students are able to really think about their strengths, their areas of growth, and their goals.
Most identity pieces fit into a few categories; students are given examples as scaffolds for reference. Some students create acrostics using their name or an important descriptive word, some write poems or lyrics, others create a visual piece that they feel represents them. There’s also an accompanying blurb where students explain why whatever it is they’ve chosen to showcase is an accurate and important aspect of their identity.
PreConference Planning and Logistics
One of the more challenging aspects of preparing for the student-led conference is gathering examples of students’ work from all of their content areas. Teachers are asked to select three eligible items from their class for possible inclusion in a student’s binder. For each class, students pick one of the three items that they feel is the most appropriate representation of their current skill level. These works are already graded by the teacher, with rubrics and written feedback included. The students fill out a reflection for each selected work.
There are students who do not have displayable works in a particular content area. For these students, we’ve designed a separate reflection process, where students write about their missing assignment, and also what remedy could be employed to ensure that they complete assignments in the future. Some students need to work on organization, while other students miss too many classes or reveal that they require more assistance. This process isn’t intended to be a punishment. To the contrary: Some of the most meaningful moments that come from preconference planning are when students realize they have missing pieces and are able to create assistance plans.
Holding the Conference
The conference itself is an extremely powerful experience for students and parents. The full portfolio provides the structure and depth that students need to guide their conversations. Students create a script that helps them as they advance from the identity piece to their evidence from academic courses.
Parents are encouraged to save questions until the end, so that students can showcase everything they have prepared. Some students stick to the script, while others are more comfortable and lead a conversation throughout the conference. During the conference, we’ve had parents become emotional and tear up with pride, having never heard their child speak about themself in this way.
As an educator, I value the importance of self-reflection and self-assessment as key strategies in establishing healthy academic habits. For parents, the student-centered conference is a natural fit. And for those of us who are lucky enough to be educators and parents, there is absolutely nothing more gratifying than watching our own children grow, hearing directly from them about their experiences at school, and celebrating every single milestone along the way.