Giving Compass' Take:

• Schools are beginning to facilitate student-led conferences between teachers, parents, and their children to build up organizational, communication, and confidence skills.

• How is this practice helping foster student agency? How will this prepare young people for the 21st century workforce?

• Here are eight reasons why students should share their work.

Rayna Freedman, a 5th grade teacher at the Jordan/Jackson Elementary School in Mansfield, Massachusetts, involves her students in parent-teacher conferences, she wrote in eSchoolNews. When she began the practice, each discussion took 45 minutes. Now they’re down to 20 minutes per family and much more efficiently run.

Students prepare digital portfolios of their own work, and Freedman believes this is important. She has eight reasons why she has students run their own parent-teacher conferences. One is that by giving them some ownership of how their work is presented to parents, they’re more invested in their own learning.

Giving students a voice in parent-teacher conferences gives them ownership over their learning. In essence, they have to defend their own work. According to the West Virginia Department of Education, for example, student-led conferences may help students “take more responsibility for their academic achievement and self-discipline.”

However, preparing students so they can lead and even architect their own parent-teacher conferences may require some preparation from educators, along with curriculum designers and administrators.

While it seems as if very young students may not able to handle the responsibility to running a parent-teacher conference, the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development disagrees. The group believes that even kindergartners can take the lead in defending their work and progress.

Showing parents what they’ve accomplished, and even demonstrating that work — whether it’s singing a song they’ve learned in class, or walking adults through a research assignment — is something every child can learn, and feel confident doing as well.

Read the full article about student-led conferences by Lauren Barack at Education Dive.