Parent interviews get a make-over
September 30, 2010
Paul Dalby
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Once a year, teachers and parents meet in schools all across Ontario for The Interview, that time-honoured stab at communication over a child’s progress.
Such is the stigma attached to this exercise, which all too often feels more like an interrogation than an interview, that educators have even changed its name. Now it is called parent-teacher conferences, or just teacher assessments.
Call it what you will, we all know how they usually go. Parents troop into a classroom and perch precariously on child-sized seats for a 15-minute review of their child’s academic performance. It can be a painful exercise in more ways than one if the parent had their own bad experience as a school kid.
“Let’s face it; all of us had a teacher that we liked to hate. I know I did,” says Peter Brackenbury, a Grade 5 teacher at Percy Centennial Public School in Warkworth. “You could have had six great teachers in a row and then one that was a battleaxe, that’s the one that scarred them for schooling.”
“So often when you’re in an interview, you can feel the nervousness of the parents,” he explains. “My job is to make them feel comfortable talking with me.”
But now there’s a revolution sweeping the province to introduce new friendlier approaches to assessments — in many cases, defusing the apprehension of facing a teacher by replacing them with student-led conferences. Other schools are overhauling the old format of parent-teacher head-to-head interviews with a much more informal year-round approach.
As a result, Ontario has a quilt-work of systems in place, differing from one school board to another, even from one school to the one in the next town.
And teachers and parents are divided over the pros and cons of the student-led initiative first introduced two years ago.
Alison Campbell, a resource teacher at Glad Park Public School in Stouffville, is one of many using student-led conferencing for her yearly review with parents.
Campbell has worked with both the traditional and newer approaches in her 10-year career but likes student-led conferencing better.
“All parents want to know how is their kid doing, but that’s a very generic question,” she says. “Now, they come in and say they’ve noticed something in the child’s portfolio and they want to know about this. It focuses them on the juicier questions.”
With the student-led approach, each student compiles a portfolio of their work up to that point of the school year, re-examining past work and reflecting on the strengths and challenges of that work.
Campbell not only supervises the compilation of each portfolio but helps the students rehearse the presentations to their parents.
“I play the parent and ask the student questions, and if the teacher isn’t there to help, how does the student handle that,” she explains.
Proponents of student-led conferences believe it’s good to involve the child in the annual process because it builds their self-esteem and opens a better dialogue with their parents about school. And, as the argument goes, change is good.
“Going outside the traditional institutional ways, if we make connections, it makes a huge difference in the student’s success,” says Charmain Brown, a veteran teacher now an instructor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.
Aside from new approaches, Brown advocates greater flexibility to accommodate parents.
“As a teacher, that’s always a challenge: connecting with parents who are working shifts or have several jobs or come from a culture where you just don’t interfere with what is happening in school,” she says.
“There has to be a bit of give and take on both sides, on the parents’ side and the school, too. If the school is experiencing large-scale problems with scheduling interviews, maybe they should be sending out a survey to parents asking, ‘What is the best way to communicate with you.’ ”
“I have done interviews at home with kids because, otherwise, I don’t see their parents for whatever reason,” Brown says. “We have to think in different ways how we can connect with parents.”
She recalled working in one school where they took the parent-teacher interviews into the community, using the recreation centre in a co-op housing project.
“Everyone brought food so that parents didn’t have to worry about cooking dinner. And then we did the interviews and it was a lot more effective,” she says.
But Brackenbury still prefers the traditional parents’ interview, albeit with a more flexible and relaxed approach.
“I try to approach them in a way that says I’m not a threatening character, I’m with your kid a lot in the day and I get to see a lot of them,” he says. “I ask people to bring up what their concerns are first and ask if they see anything on the report that jumps out at them.”
Brackenbury says parents all too often haven’t read their child’s school report before they come in for the interview. “They’ll say, ‘This is the first time I’ve seen it.’ ”
The solution, he feels, is to encourage better contact throughout the school year, with messages back-and-forth in the students’ agenda, phone calls home and casual drop-in meetings before or after school if there is a particular problem to be resolved.
The year-round open-door approach is appreciated by parents, says Sheila Wright, 46, a writer whose 10-year-old son Dylan is in Brackenbury’s class.
“I like the fact that my contact with the school is not limited just to the parent-teacher interview,” she says. “I feel comfortable writing a note or stopping by if it’s 10 minutes before class if I have something I want to ask about Dylan. Then, when it comes to the parent interview, I already know what is going on.”