076: How to rock your parent-teacher conference

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  Transcript Jen: [00:21] Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Today we’re going to take another look at a topic related to school and it’s one that you’re going to be able to use very soon. We’re looking at parent teacher conferences. Your conferences in your new school or preschool or maybe classroom within the same school are likely coming up within the next couple of weeks. And these things can be stressful!” We get 10 minutes with a teacher whom we may or may not have had any interaction with beyond, hi, how are you?” And we really have no idea what to expect, so ideally parent teacher conferences shouldn’t just be a one shot opportunity to discuss your child’s progress in school. They should be part of an ongoing conversation about progress in school, but maybe also things happening outside school that are affecting that progress. But how can we know what to expect from these conferences and how can we prepare for them, how can we think about them in the context of all the other interactions that we are or could be having with our child’s school? Jen:  [01:54] So we have not one but two guests here today to help us figure this out. We have Dr Maggie Caspe. She’s the director of research and professional learning and the global family research project. She had her masters in education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a Ph.D In applied developmental psychology from New York University and Dr Elena Lopez, co-director at the Global Family Research Project. She received her doctorate in social anthropology from Harvard University. Both Dr Caspe and Dr Lopez conduct research on how families, early childhood programs, schools and communities and the relationships between these support children’s learning. The Global Family Research Project prides itself on doing work that is scientifically based, cutting edge, accessible, and practical. It sounds a lot like the goals of this podcast, so I’m so excited to have them here with us. Welcome Dr. Caspe and Dr Lopez. Dr. Caspe: [02:45] Thanks for having us. New Speaker: [02:46] So let’s start with a little empathy here. It would be a good place to start. When I was researching this episode, I did a general search for parent teacher conferences just to see what would pop up and several resources for teachers were first on the list. One of the top hits contained this quote. “If there is one part of the school year that strikes fear into the heart of any teacher, it’s parent teacher conference time.” Why are teachers afraid of parent teacher conferences? Dr. Lopez:  [03:13] We’re so glad you started with this question because it lies at the heart of a lot of what we do in our work, which is in part to help prepare school and community educators for family engagement and maybe I can take a quick step back and define what we mean by family engagement. Research shows that family engagement is composed of three main pillars. The first is that it’s a shared responsibility among families, schools, and community to support children’s learning for success in school and in life. In other words, it’s all about relationships and trust and ongoing communication and conversation. Not just families blindly supporting school goals and mandates; it’s more than raising money and joining PGA. It’s the way that families promote and advocate for dirty and it’s the way that schools and other organizations open up their doors to support families in getting the information and support they need and also listening and understanding what parents and families desire. Dr. Lopez:  [04:34] And we also know that family engagement takes place everywhere all the time. Not just in school. There is a statistic we like to quote, which is that of the 6,000 hours of awake time children have available to them and really only 1,000 of those hours are spent in school, so children are learning in a lot of spaces outside school: parks, libraries and the home, so it’s not fruitful or productive to think of family engagement as just taking place in school, but we broaden our notion of family engagement to all these settings as well. And the third pillar is that family engagement, bath waste begin early in birth really and continue all the way through high school. Although the ways in which families are engaged in their children’s learning and social and emotional development will change as children mature. So family engagement is really complex. It is nuanced. It exists across time and space and it’s constantly spiraling so you can picture a big wide ocean of family engagement and parent teacher conferences are just one ripple of it. They are part of a larger ongoing conversation that is happening between parents and other adults that care for a child. The parent teacher conference ideally is not the first interaction that a parent is having with a teacher, but instead is part of an ongoing dialogue across space and time making. Maggie, do you want to add to that? Dr. Caspe: [06:27] Thanks for that introduction because I think, Jen, it sort of brings us back a little bit to your original question of why teachers might be afraid of parent teacher conferences and I think what we know is that there are a few things going on. First, you know, we sort of know that for the most part educators are not prepared for family engagement in their foundational coursework and they’re not given a lot of opportunities to learn about how to make families the central part of their practice. It’s funny, so I began my career as a kindergarten teacher and I remember really feeling nervous and petrified during my first parent teacher conferences and in a large part it was – I wasn’t exactly sure what to do. I was really well trained to run reading blocks and engage kids in math and I really felt like I had behavior management strategies down, but the parent teacher conference with something more elusive and for new teachers and even experienced ones I think how you talk with families about what kids are doing, but how they’re doing I think is really hard. And then once you get into the classroom, we know that teachers don’t get a lot of support either in their continuing education around working with families. Dr. Caspe: [07:43] There’s often very little support from administrators or colleagues to pick up and improve their practice along the way. But I want to reflect on the third problem and I think this really gets to the heart of what makes parent teacher conferences a little bit difficult. And this is that parent teacher conferences really weren’t designed to be a conversation of listening. They were really set up as a hierarchical structure of teachers reporting to families. As you know, quote unquote the professional. What children know and can do. So if you could picture it in your mind. Parents often come to meetings, they sit face to face with a teacher and a chair that their child probably sits in every day in a weird, contorted way, and your goal as the parent is often to talk about your child’s individual experience and development within the school. But as Sarah Lawrence Lightfoot writes in her seminal work, “The Essential conversation,” Dr. Caspe: [08:48] She looks at how these conversations make parents feel really raw and exposed, and they hear echoes and murmurs of their own past in their own school histories which often leads to these feelings of nervousness and anxiety that you mentioned and teachers maybe not to the same extent. Also feel uncertain, exposed and defensive because this is the place probably more than any, that their confidence in their professionalism might be the most directly challenged. And the other thing that Sarah Lawrence Lightfoot also draws out is during these conversations were actually replaying some of the larger tensions that exist around family engagement in terms of child rearing, race, class culture, language, gender. Who gets to talk and who needs to remain silent and what makes quote unquote a good parent. So all of these things are playing out in this 10 minute conversation and that makes it a little tough. Dr. Caspe: [09:55] I will say though, I don’t want to end on such a downer, right? A lot of the work that Elena and I do is to reimagine and rethink with family and school communication and the parent teacher conference can look like and you know, there are bright spots and we can talk about those. We know that some places home visits go on or we know that in some school districts there’s been a massive restructuring, so parent teacher conferences are in done individually, but maybe in groups and teams or even text messaging and digital media have really helped support this process. So it’s not all big and nervous. There are bright spots, but there’s a lot that goes on in those 10 minutes. Jen: [10:37] Yeah. Thanks for drawing that out a little bit. I think it can really help parents who might have this perception of teachers as sort of a monolithic and to see that are the experts and they know what’s going on and they’d been trained to do this and actually quite possibly they haven’t. And they’re, they’re just as nervous as you are for a variety of the reasons that you mentioned. So going into this conversation with a very open mind and open heart I think can be very helpful thing. So let’s get into some specifics then because before this conversation you sent me an awesome resource that’s called Parent Teacher Conferences: Strategies for Principals, Teachers and Parents, and we’re going to discuss that a lot more in the show and it’s actually available on your site. We’ll put a link in the references to the parents can go and find it. It’s super short, really easy to read and use. And so in it you described the five R’s. Can you tell us what the five R’s please? Dr. Caspe: [11:27] Yeah, so the five R’s are: Reach Out, Raise Up, Reinforce, Relate and Reimagine. I sometimes pretend I’m doing yoga poses while I say them, but really they’re our way of helping ourselves and others organize and think about the ways to help educators and families share responsibility across time and space. And these really grew out of really in depth interviews and conversations we’ve had with educators over the past few years in a variety of spaces as well as librarians after-school staff to really understand some of those best family engagement strategies and you know, quite simply reaching out means that family engagement programs and resources are accessible to those who often have the most difficulty taking advantage of them. Raising up means that practices, teachers, families work together on two-way communication. Families have an opportunity to share what they know about their children and co-design action plans with teachers. Dr. Caspe: [12:36] And then the third R is really this notion of reinforce and it comes from this idea that we as parents are children’s first teachers and that family’s cultural values, norms, language and contexts always need to be integrated into these types of conversations that families and teachers have. The fourth R is about relationships and it really highlights the value of supporting families in building peer-to-peer networks as well as relationships with their children and finally reimagine is about ways to increase families access to an understanding of information on children’s progress and using really community agencies to help with that. Jen: [13:18] Okay. Super. Thanks for that overview and I would like to delve into each of those a little bit more so that we can really get an understanding of what are the tools that we can use to make these parent teacher conferences more productive for everybody. So the first R you said is reaching out and sometimes parents have scheduling problems and they can’t get childcare so they can attend a conference or maybe they can’t get transportation or maybe English isn’t their first language and they just don’t feel comfortable interacting with the teacher. So I’m curious what kinds of reaching out should parents expect to see from their child’s school and what can they do if the resources they need aren’t forthcoming? Dr. Lopez: [13:54] I’m going to start with what teachers can do and they can be flexible by being available by phone or holding a video conference when an in person meeting doesn’t work for the family and teachers can also spend part off the meeting with parents just getting to know the family better before even talking about a student’s academic progress. So one thing that teachers can consider us long as the proper releases are signed is still allowed parents or guardians to bring another family member or friend, if that helps them feel more comfortable, especially if that person that they are taking along with them can help with translation and principals also have a role in reaching out to families. They can support families by ensuring that there are interpreters that...