I believe this round of conferences have been the best yet due to our increased efforts and depth with students' showcase portfolios. I want to capture what I found to be the positive aspects of this effort so that we can repeat these efforts next year.
Supplies
Students were asked to bring a one-inch showcase binder filled with about 100 clear sheets to school in the fall. They could choose whatever color they wanted. These hand-held binders serve as a good vehicle for saving and storing students' learning highlights and reflections. The notebooks are also a good vehicle for share and at the end of the year, a wonderful keepsake of a child's fifth grade year.
Class Twitter Account
The class Twitter account includes an ongoing visual story of fifth grade learning highlights. Students capture pictures from the account for their showcase portfolios. This adds valuable images to students' reflections about the year's learning highlights and accomplishments.
Introductory Showcase Portfolios Pages
At the start of the year students complete a cover page, table of contents, divider pages, a happiness survey, and initial assessments of their social emotional and academic learning/goals. This creates a good framework for the portfolio efforts throughout the year.
All About Me
At the start of the year we have students complete an "All About Me" page. Students really enjoyed sharing this page since for the first time I added it to their portfolios. Next year, I'd like student to share this page at the start of the year when we first sit down with students and parents to discuss the year ahead in terms of goals, challenges, and interests.
SEL Reflections
Students reflect on CASAL's five areas of social emotional learning at the start of the year and then mid year they reflect on character traits. These assessments introduce families and students to the language, value, and details related to what it means to develop positive social emotional attributes.
Assessment Results
We merge our spreadsheets of student data points into one-page stats sheets that provide students and their families with their scores on grade-level assessments and unit tests. We add comments and descriptors to these pages so parents have a good idea of how their child is doing at this point with regard to the grade-level standards and expectations. In the future, we may want to add a hard copy of the standards-based report card to these portfolios too.
Program Assessment
Students complete a number of reflections that assess the learning program. This provides families and teachers with a good evaluation of our efforts to date as well as ideas about how we can improve the program for individual students and the grade level as a whole.
Examples and Reflections of Academic Work
For each main academic area and project, there is a reflection page. Students generally reflect on and include examples of their writing, book list, science learning, social studies reports, and math projects.
Signature Learning
To prepare for the student-led conferences, students choose and mark with sticky notes about five examples of their most meaningful learning to share with families. Students' choices represent a wide range of learning efforts. It is wonderful to see students' pride and ownership as they share highlights of the year's learning.
Conversation
As children share their showcase portfolios, family members, students, and educators engage in a positive conversation about a child's strengths, challenges, interests, and needs. This conversation becomes a positive collaborative coaching session emphasizing a child's strengths and interests and thinking about ways we can all work to support that child more in and out of school.
These student-led family/educator conferences are a great match for modern learning. It gives students center-stage with regard to their learning for a good 30-45 minutes.
Improvements
The greatest challenge with these valuable conferences is time. To give students a good 30-45 minutes to lead their learning is positive, but this is an add-on to the already busy week that includes about an hour a day for prep and about 5-6 hours a day of time-on-task teaching with large numbers of students. I think it would be worthwhile for systems to acknowledge the strength of this family/teacher conference model by reworking schedules and support to provide more time for preparation and the conferences. This is something we can think about and perhaps advocate for in the future.
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