Parent Conferences

This week, I was given the opportunity to attend a parent conference with my supervising teacher. During this conference, I took notes on what was said, how information was presented, and how the parents reacted to the information given.
My teacher followed the parent conference outline I have been taught in my previous class. She opened with several compliments about the student's behavior and good work examples. She followed these compliments with the core problem, his motivation and focus. The teacher provided the parents with several poor work samples from the student and also provided good examples from his classmates. The parents were hesitant to believe what the teacher was claiming until they saw their son's work examples. Once they saw work samples, they were more open to the teacher's suggestions. My teacher and I worked together to suggest several changes in the student's home life we believed would help with the student's motivation problem. We suggested having a set schedule each day, requiring nightly reading, and taking the student on educational trips over the weekend.
Overall, I believe this conference was very helpful. In the days after the conference, we noticed a slight change in the student's attitude and motivation. He was more focused during the day and completed a larger portion of his assigned work than he had before the conference. Seeing this conference helped ease my fears about communicating with the parents in my future classroom.

Writing Learning Goals and Scales

During my full week of internship, I had the opportunity to attend a professional development conference entitled "Writing Appropriate Learning Goals". This conference was hosted by an experienced educator who had previously attended several workshops on writing goals and creating scales. As a group, we were asked to choose a Common Core reading benchmark and write an appropriate learning goal for our students. After choosing a goal, we presented to the entire staff and had our goal assessed. Finally, we learned about the four-finger learning scale and worked together to create a scale that broke our learning goal into leveled expectations.
I found this conference very helpful. I was able to work with my professional peers and was able to learn from their experience in the field. It was amazing to see professionals work together to accomplish a common goal. Attending this conference helped me see the importance of what I learn every time I am in my college courses. I was even able to help answer questions about Common Core that my peers were unsure about.


RECs: 6.1, 6.7