Consistency Counts

My sister-in-law and I teach at the same school; she is the art teacher, and I teach sixth grade language arts. We're about the same age, but this is only her second year of full-time teaching. An artist herself, she was a stay-at-home mom for my nephews until just a few years ago. When both the boys were in school, she decided to substitute teach for the extra income, and she found a second calling in art education. It took some time to get her credits and credentials, but last year she got her first "real" teaching job, and now we're colleagues, too.

Despite the occasional mail mix-up (our boxes are right next to each other), I couldn't be happier to have her teaching in the same school. Her perspective as new teacher, elective teacher, and former middle-school parent gives me a lot of interesting insight on things, too. Take, for example, conferences, which we have coming up next week. At our school, the conferences are student-led, and conducted through teacher advisory, or homeroom. Our TAs are heterogeneous, and all full-time teachers have one, so that means that I have students in my homeroom whom I do not teach, as do all of us, but the numbers are a bit higher for the the PE teachers, the elective teachers, the foreign language teachers, etc.

Before student-led conferences, this was a source of tension at this time of the year. Often, parents did not want to confer with someone who didn't actually teach their child, and preferably teach him or her a "core" subject-- science, social studies, language arts, or math. That meant that core teachers shouldered much more of a burden on conference day. Perhaps more subtly, this attitude also undermines the value of an advisory period, which is one of the cornerstones of the middle school model. It is our responsibility as teacher advisors to know how each student is progressing, so that we can offer the appropriate support. TA should be more than taking attendance and reading the paper while the kids chat and desperately try to finish last night's homework.

Back to conferences, then: When our school committed to student-led conferences, we agreed that they would be through advisory without exception. I admit that I was skeptical, but we were given tools to allow the students to do a frank self-assessment; we had teacher feedback on both that same instrument and in the form of current grades, and using those, we guided the students to set some goals for themselves. On conference day, the students presented all that same information to their parents, and we were there as support, resource, and witness. The response was overwhelmingly positive from parents, students, and teachers. We had found an incredibly successful model for the middle school conference.

Flash forward a couple of years: we're slipping. Some TAs are being formed on the basis of whether or not the teacher has those students in class. Some second language and special education teachers are pulling their caseloads from other TAs for conferences and then parceling out those students that they don't teach in return. As a result, my sister-in-law must meet with four students who are not in her homeroom, and whom she neither teaches nor worked with to prepare for conferences, and their parents.

That's lame, and it only serves to justify the actions of that teacher everyone heard about who sits at his desk, "working" on the computer while his students and their parents confer. Really? Why didn't they all just stay home?