Essentially the result is a good conversation amongst all of the main members of a child's learning team about a child's strengths, challenges, interests, and goals. The teachers also share stat sheets which include assessments scores and comments from the child's main academic teachers. If needed, teachers and parents will speak alone for a few minutes during the conference too. The overall goal of these student-led discussions is to put the child in the driver's seat of their education.
Our collegial team has been developing this approach for a number of years now. At first, including the child was an option, and now we expect all children to lead their conferences. We've also developed the reflection pieces over time too to make those surveys more holistic and representative of the work we're doing and the ways children can use reflection to develop their effort, investment, self-advocacy, and success.
To further develop this approach, we can do the following:
- Bring most learning full circle including reflection and completion of projects, assessments, and other learning efforts.
- Include photos more often--pictures of students actively learning truly enrich the portfolio. When a child describes what's happening in a learning photo, they truly bring their learning alive during the conference.
- Update portfolios regularly--perhaps adding a reflection time each week where students look over and update their learning portfolio.
When students present, the developmental curve related to metacognition is evident. Some students easily lead the entire conference demonstrating keen awareness of their learning, and others are more reluctant and uncomfortable with this leadership. Also, students' reflections vary from sparse and elementary to deep and more sophisticated responses. This developmental curve makes me want to investigate these questions:
- How does nature/nurture affect metacognition? Are some students better at self-reflection because they have had more opportunity for this, or is this related more to the natural development of children?
- How can we help families to help children develop stronger metacognitive awareness? How can we grow this skill more at school?
- We notice some gender differences with regard to metacognition--is this a nature or nurture difference? I want to understand this more.
These child-led conferences help educators to really know their students better while also providing a good glimpse of the class as a whole. For example, there was a trend with this year's students with regard to active learning--they love moving which leads me to think about how I'll integrate more movement into the learning.
Do you employ student-led conferences in your learning environment? If so, what are the highlights of this process? How do you develop and grow this work? I'll be thinking more about this in the days ahead.
