At our school, we do "Curriculum Conferences" or "Academic Parent-Team Meetings". These are an extra parent-teacher conference-like setup that was pioneered by the Harvard Family Research Project. The idea is that we focus on student data during our discussions with the families.
We focus on the skills that our students need to improve, teach the parents a skill they can improve with their kids at home, and give them time to discuss with other parents or us what is going on in their kids' lives.
These conferences take a lot of time and effort to prepare for and carry out.
Our schedule this time will be one hour for each teacher in Spanish and one hour in English, for one night only. In the fall, we hosted the conference for two nights, four hours each. I think this format will be much better.
Here is the data that we show parents:
- Reading CBM Measures from winter (compared with fall's, and for students who have been in our district, their entire history)
- Math Computation scores from our winter benchmark (compared with fall's and for students who have been in our district, their entire history)
- Reading and Math scores compared to their whole class so the parents can see how their child is doing compared to the benchmark and their peers.
Those scores are pretty simple to generate with our data systems. No big deal. What is more difficult is showing precise data which compares students scores to their peers. We want parents to know how their students are performing, so they can make a better determination about how much their students need.
This is what the data looks like in a powerpoint presentation. The teachers give parents a folder with their child's name and a number that corresponds to the chart above.
I created a tutorial to explain how to do this using AIMSweb. If you don't use AIMSweb, you can still complete it using the template spreadsheet for the data.
To use the spreadsheet, you just need to enter the student's names, assign them a number, enter their scores, then their benchmarks, and you are good to go.
If you use this, let me know how it works for you.
