Four-minute conferences?

Teaching Pre K-8, Mar 1996 by Mann, Thomasina

Parent/student/teacher conferences offer a grand opportunity to build rapport, gain the confidence of parents and reassure students that the school cares about their success. But how long does the district administration think it should take to have a conference in middle school?

In elementary school, three afternoons are devoted to conferences, giving the teacher nine hours of conference time with 27 to 35 families. During the three days, each child's parents are given a specific time to confer with the teacher.

The same administration now allows six hours for sixth grade teachers to confer with 60 to 87 families. This allows the teachers in our sixth grade pod a four-minute conference with each family. (Seventh and eighth grade teachers have it even worse. They have six hours to confer with 90 to 180 families.)

Letters home. In an attempt to be more realistic, our pod decided that we would confer for two afternoons from 4 to 7 and one afternoon from 3 to 6 We sent three letters home explaining the time schedule and the importance of this conference. We encouraged parents who had a need to talk at length to come for an individual conference at a later date.

Each day, we opened the doors to greet eager students and parents waiting for conferences. In the first evening, we saw 15 families by 9 pm, two hours past our scheduled closing. We wearily headed for home only to return at seven the next morning and teach a regular scheduled day. The second and third days were more of the same.

Language barrier. Many of our kids' parents do not speak English and so a conference cannot take place in four minutes (the student acts as translator and this is often a difficult task). I've been doing this for seven years and I've yet to complete a conference in four minutes.

The third and final day commenced with three exhausted teachers meeting each of six periods for only 32 minutes, which required us to teach from 8:02 until 12:30 with no lunch break.

On Monday when we met to take a tally, we had seen 53 families out of 87 in our pod. We had spent 16 hours conferencing. We had been paid back with two hours of compensatory time. We had five requests for phone conferences and we still needed to make contact with 34 families.

How and where and when will be up to us to decide, with no concern on the part of the administration. All three of us really believe these face-to-face contacts with the parents are worthwhile. But how can we do it better? That's the question that haunts our planning sessions for the next few weeks. Has the district administration really thought about the problem? Does it care?

Spring conferences take place in Mach when we repeat this madness, but it has been our experience that far fewer parents will make the effort to come.