When Pupils Sit In on Conferences

When Francisca Gamez sits down with the parents of her Boyle Heights kindergartners for the ritual fall conferences in early November, she’ll let someone else do most of the talking: the pupils.

“If it’s their own children showing them where they are doing well and where they need extra help at home, hopefully the parents will take a stronger stand in their children’s education,” Gamez said.

With tougher academic standards raising the bar and schools holding back more faltering students, parent-teacher conferences are assuming a bigger role. In an effort to make them more useful in keeping children on track, some educators are turning the usual format on its ear.

Although the traditional style--teachers rattling off a quick summary of children’s grades and behavior quirks, no kids allowed!--still predominates, variations abound. In many classrooms, teachers are urging students or parents to take the lead in assessing students’ strengths and weaknesses.

Reforms, said John Liechty, an assistant superintendent of instruction with the Los Angeles Unified School District, “will probably bring a whole new life to parent-teacher conferences.”

In 13 years of teaching, Karen Caruso said, she has never seen a change agent as powerful as a student-led conference.

“For me, to have a conference without a student present when it’s all about the student seemed so empty,” Caruso said one recent morning in her third-grade classroom at 3rd Street Elementary School in Hancock Park.

Key to the success of a student-led conference, educators say, is a “portfolio” that includes examples of work over several weeks or months. In Caruso’s class, students begin gathering samples at the start of the school year and plugging them into white, loose-leaf binders: the first spelling test, book reports, phonics and spelling exercises, math problems. The idea is to have an array of materials that will help everyone gauge the student’s progress over time.

Seeing Children in a New Light

Many skeptical parents emerge believers from their first student-led conference. Last year, Daniel Lee saw his retiring third-grade daughter, Rebekah, in a new light and noticed that she seemed to be transformed by the experience of showing her portfolio to her parents, with Caruso standing by for support.

“She was kind of a shy person,” Lee said. “After that, she had self-esteem and was full of confidence and liked to talk. I think it affected her life in a positive way.”

One danger is letting the portfolio become an unwieldy repository for everything the student has done, said Jon Rice, assistant principal at Fernangeles Elementary School in Sun Valley. Teachers there are being urged to work with students to select a manageable set of items. Some work samples will travel with students throughout their years at the school, so that each teacher can get a preview of incoming students’ abilities and fine-tune curriculum as needed.

Sounding like a stockbroker, Rice talks of teachers and students becoming well versed in “portfolio management” this school year. That is a vital step, he said, in moving toward the school’s eventual goal of having student-led conferences in every classroom.

Rice expects to see a couple of ancillary benefits once the program gets up and running: Students will hone presentation skills in a dry run with teachers before delivering their spiels to parents. And teachers will be able to spot weaknesses as students struggle to express themselves on certain subjects.

Most schools leave it to the teacher to decide what type of conference to conduct. Teachers, in turn, allow parents to decide whether they are comfortable having the child in the room.

Susan DeBlasio, who teaches a combined class of second- and third-graders at Corinne A. Seeds University Elementary School, a laboratory school on the UCLA campus, finds that she gleans helpful information about family dynamics by watching parents and children interact.

Most parents, she said, value having the pupil involved because the child can be included in devising a game plan for improvement. A few, however, are loath to discuss concerns in front of their child.

Including the child can make for a volatile session. Bill Higbee, an eighth-grade social sciences teacher at Gage Middle School in Huntington Park, has seen parents dissolve in tears or slap their children when confronted by bad news about attendance or homework. Still, Higbee likes to have students present because parents get a clear picture.

“I might ask the student, ‘How do you think you’re doing? What could you be doing differently?’ ” said Higbee, who often conducts conferences in Spanish at the predominantly Latino school. “Often, the student is very reserved and sullen, especially if they know behavior and work habits are not satisfactory.”

With 150 students, Higbee has very little time--a mere two or three minutes per parent--during the school year’s two official parent-teacher conference periods. He uses the phone to bolster communication with the two-thirds of parents he never sees at school. Often, the most effective contacts he makes are impromptu calls from his classroom when a child is disrupting the lesson or shirking homework.

“The first time I get on the phone and start speaking Spanish to the parent, I can see the look on the kid’s face: Uh-oh,” he said.

Gage is one of several Southland schools where the idea of student-led conferences is gathering steam. Malabar Street School, where Gamez teaches, is another. Last year, one or two teachers asked students to lead conferences with parents. Now they’re enlisting more colleagues to give it a try.

Making Parents Part of Process

Many teachers realize that they can’t impart all they need to about a student in one or two parent conferences, no matter what the format.

During the first week of school, Barbara Huff, who teaches fifth grade at Nestle Avenue Elementary School in Tarzana, makes a welcoming phone call to each parent; throughout the year, she sends weekly updates home to each child’s parents.

“There shouldn’t be any surprises,” she said. “I need them to know I take in loco parentis [in place of parents] seriously.”

In one of the most unusual twists on parent-teacher conferences, a teacher in Carson even has parents conferring with one another.

As the mother of a 21-year-old daughter, Dorthy LeVels endured years of mundane parent-teacher conferences where she tended to hear the same things.

“I felt there had to be something more worthwhile because parents are taking time off work for this,” said LeVels, a fifth-grade teacher at Ambler Avenue Elementary, a magnet school in Carson.

Expanding on an idea she read about 10 years ago in an education magazine, she has parents come to the classroom in groups of six. First they interact with one another, sharing problems and solutions. Then their children, speaking to the group, present an area of strength, such as an autobiography or a handwriting sample or a book report.

After that, each student meets with his or her parents. Here, conversations can get emotional as parents consider other students’ work and how their child stacks up. Finally, LeVels meets with each family in turn. The whole process takes an hour and a half.

By that time, she said, “the parent usually has quite a few questions, and the quality of questions becomes much greater. They’re really into the child’s work, and the child is motivated.”

LeVels has encouraged a couple of other teachers to use the technique and recently presented the idea to the school’s staff. She got their attention when she noted that she has nearly 100% participation--a rarity in urban public schools.

“My parents,” she said, “are really excited about it.”