Student Led Conferences

The artifact in review is the book Knowing What Counts: Conferencing and Reporting by Anne Davies, Kathleen Gregory, and Caren Cameron.

Reference in Question:
Knowing What Counts: Conferencing and Reporting. Kathleen Gregory, Caren Cameron, Anne Davies. Connections Publishing. BC, Canada.2001.
https://www.connect2learning.com/cp/product.php?xProd=7

Synopsis

I have had the “Knowing What Counts” series sitting on the side of my desk for a while now. They are on loan to me from a friend of mine who says that they base a lot of their classroom on the teachings of Anne Davies. At the risk of jumping on a bandwagon, I agreed that this was pretty high praise, and worth my time to look into. I have been looking into “Conferencing and Reporting” for this review.

The thing that I found particularly interesting about this book is that it is not solely on student-parent-teacher style conferences. Anne Davies breaks it down to have many, informal conferences throughout the year, led by the students. They are not teacher directed end of term style interviews, but an on going process involving students, teachers, peers, family, and anyone who is interested in the student’s learning. In these conferences, as Davies points out, students take a lead role in demonstrating their learning. They are informally examining the “depth, detail and range of their learning.” (p ___)

The reasoning behind this is that when students are involved in assessment process and learning to articulate what they’ve learned and can improve on, their achievement improves. Students are given choices; choices on different methods of demonstrating their learning, of ways to analyze their thinking, of who to conference with and what to conference about. Choices, according to Davies, equal motivation.

This is not without working with the students. This style of conferencing requires that teachers talk with students about keeping variety of their work for portfolios. Teachers need to provide a variety of examples of ways to get students to compile work for conferences. Students then choose examples, commenting on why they chose them, and asking for input from others as to what they see, what they like, how they would improve the piece of work.

Davies utilizes things she calls “goal envelopes”. Students, in their conferences with the teacher (and parents, etc) will choose an achievable goal for themselves and write it on the outside of a large envelope. They then keep work that shows movement toward goal and track it in the envelope. Once they have achieved the goal, they create a new envelope with a new, presumably more advanced, goal.

Class time must be devoted to preparing students to take a lead role in the conferences, and helping them to assuming responsibility for their own learning and reporting. This sounds like a daunting task. Davies recommends that teachers start with small steps such as sending home student work samples, beginning conferences in only one subject and then permeating out from there. She recommends talking about conferencing in the school or class newsletter to raise awareness of it to avoid surprising parents.

Davies concludes that, “when teachers involve students in assessment practices, ‘the gains in achievement are the largest ever reported for educational interventions’” (Black and William (1998, p. 61) in Conferencing and Reporting). It seems to make sense. Students are involved, they’re evaluating their own learning and trying to poke holes in what they’ve done and try to better themselves. It definitely sounds good.

Evaluation

There are a few things that really surprise me about this book. The first is the informal approach to conferencing. It is something that has never occurred to me before. At least, not in an organized thought kind of way. I like the idea of having students taking time to analyze their own work, find something that maybe they’re quite proud of and something that they know they didn’t do their best on and sharing that. I think that it provides a great opportunity for learning, and understanding where students are coming from. Particularly if students might not be as gifted in writing. If a student has learned the material, and can apply it to life, but cannot seem to express themselves through the medium of the task, conferencing can help the teacher to understand where that student is at more clearly.

I am definitely a supporter of student leadership. Students need to learn skills of self-advocacy and self-reflection. Conferences in the way that Davies describes them will help them get to this place, but what happens if their support system is not very strong? It is good of Davies to say that they should be conferencing with teachers, parents, grandparents, uncles, coaches, etc., but what if that person does not want to take the time to help them, or does not have the time to go through it with them? This could be potentially problematic and hurtful to the students. I think that this is just something that needs to be addressed on a class-by-class basis. Perhaps students could be paired with a class in an older grade and they could help them to assess how to improve their work. I think it is just a consideration that teachers will need to keep in mind when they say, “take this home and share it with your parents or family or someone who cares about your school work”. Not that I am so pessimistic to think that children might not have anyone who fits this description, just that occasionally, they might have a tough time sometimes.

On the flip side of that, I think that this could be a good self-esteem builder for students that are typically low achievers. It gives them the opportunity to take home an example of their work to their parents to show them something that they are proud of, and explain to their parents why. It will give parents a way to monitor the growth of their child as they progress through the year.

My final concern is one that was brought up in classroom discussions. Time. This type of conferencing will consume a significant amount of class time in both the preparation stage, as well as the actual conferencing stages. However, I do believe that it will have a very good return on investment. By putting in time at the beginning of the year to prepare students for this type of work, it will only become easier as the year goes on, and I believe that the benefits outweigh the costs.

Overall, this book has excited me. It provides the answers to many questions that I see within its pages, and the authors realize that it is unrealistic to utilize all of the techniques in the book. They merely provide a large sampling of ways to implement conferencing, and leave it to each teacher to use them in whichever way they feel comfortable. Anne Davies’ thorough explanations are definitely a welcomed resource to any new to profession teacher.

Anne Davies

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