It’s time for the first round of parent-teacher conferences, so even though I feel like I’ve barely blinked since back-to-school, enough time has actually passed for our teachers to share some initial feedback about your children. These meetings are an important benchmark in a school’s life, one that justifies the shift from the usual school schedule. This year, there’s an additional feature: a new one-day Elementary camp on Monday, organized at the request of TÉPA and made possible by our new facilities.
Families may not be aware of what these meetings represent for our teachers. In a run-of-the-mill (or simply larger) school, the time is often used to get to know parents, which is not exactly the case chez nous. Between the back-to-school picnic, chaperoning field trips, and apéros, we’ve already had plenty of opportunities to meet one another. With that first box already checked at The École, our objective is to make the most effective use of the PTCs. That clear intention guides our pre-PTC staff meetings and can sometimes cause a touch of apprehension.
Ever since we adopted WE CARE as our guiding principle, we’ve been paying close attention to how we organize the PTCs. Families take the time off to come in and dedicate part of their day to meeting with us, and regular lessons are cancelled. It is therefore imperative that the information we share is both accurate and meaningful. We have the data and our vision of the children, but it is crucial for us to discover the parents’ perspective as well, so we can form a clearer picture.
In this context, made even more demanding by the relatively short length of each meeting, we have to make choices: what to show, what to highlight, what to say, how to say it (of course), which tone to use, which words to choose, all the while having an aim in mind. As you can imagine, nothing is left to chance. It is meticulously prepared, thrashed out in advance, and it’s often during the pre-PTC conversations between colleagues that we learn to become even better, to finetune our analyses, finding ourselves closer to the children, so that we can support them better.
Of course, it’s a never-ending process. Sophie has listed feedback as her top priority for her teaching team in the coming months. It has become clear to us that while we take care in planning our meetings with parents, the students can sometimes feel perplexed by the feedback they, in turn, receive; a clear sign that we still have work to do to better integrate feedback, peer evaluation, and self-assessment into our classroom practices.
Ironically, as we currently organize them, the PTCs from Kindergarten through 5th Grade center on a child who is absent from the conversation, even as we strive to make them active participants in their own learning. It’s a contradiction that we’ve partly resolved in Middle School by including students in the PTSCs (parent-teacher-student conferences). After some initial hesitation (on all three sides), it has now become the norm—one we don’t even question anymore—and perhaps it’s a model worth extending to all grade levels.
To be continued!