Do parent-teacher conferences cause you stress? Have you ever faced a parent and drew a blank on what to say? I have and it’s a scenario I never want to live through again. It happened, not because I didn’t know the student, but because it can be hard to know just what to say about each of my ninety students after a very long night, exhausting night of talking with parents.
The reality is that as much as I wish I knew everything about my students, I don’t. Most of the teachers in our school see over ninety students in their rooms each day. We do our best to know exactly where they are academically by parent-teacher conference time, but it’s not possible for us to know everything. We can’t always tell how hard they’ve been working at home or if they are really satisfied with their progress or not. We only know what we see from the outside looking in, and that’s not the whole picture.
Self-Evaluation is such an important part of the learning process. When students take time to reflect on their goals – and their progress with reaching them – they need be accountable for their work and you get a rich resource to use with parents.
Tomorrow, in preparation for our parent-teacher conference, I’ll be giving my students these forms to fill in (grab them for free by clicking on the link). The editable forms ask them to reflect on:
-Their strengths as English students
-The areas that they need to work on
-The amount of effort they have been putting into the course
-Their thoughts about their progress and suggestions for improvement.
I’ve done this in the past and have always been very impressed with how honest students were, especially as they knew I would be showing the evaluations to their parents. Most were bang on. It was a great exercise because the kids had to reflect on their progress, and it gave me a powerful tool to have when I met with their folks. I was able to discuss my observations of their children and then I gave them the forms their children had filled in. Make sure you grab them here!
Thank you for this form. Since it's a pdf, I can't edit it, but there is a spelling error. Can this be fixed? It has "prod" instead of "proud" on the student form. Thanks!
Hi, Jenny. It's fixed now.