Tonight was the first night of our first Parent-Advisor conferences. I always have loved parent-advisor conferences because it’s a chance to see my advisees in a larger context. It’s a chance to really sit down with a student and a parent and look at the whole picture of who that student is in the context of school.

The way conferences work at SLA (and yes, we did it this way at Beacon) is that all the teachers write narrative reports on every student at the end of the first and third marking periods, which is right before parent-advisor conferences. (We write them on a database program. Currently it’s not web-enabled, but we’re working on that.) We print those and sort those by advisor. Then, every advisor schedules conference time with the families in their advisory. The parents and students come in and meet with the advisor who goes over all the narrative reports. And because we have a four-year advisory program, that advisor and that family get to have these meetings over time, which means that every student knows there’s always an adult in the building who has a real sense of the whole picture of of who they are as a student.

It was interesting to give the kids their reports in advisory today before conferences. For most of the students, it was the first time they’d seen narrative reports. It was interesting to see them react to how a report card can be so much more than a letter or a number. A few mentioned how, even if they didn’t do as well as they’d like, the narrative made them feel better, because the teachers wrote about their strengthens and weaknesses and gave them concrete ideas for improvement. I think it changes the way they look at teachers when they see that kind of thoughtful reflection about student progress too. And for parents, it’s a powerful moment to get that much feedback. One parent said, "This is so much to take in!" But in every case, it’s the invitation into conversation, into improvement, into deep analysis and reflection of how and why we perform the way we do in school.