Student Led Conferences

Soon it will be Thanksgiving and one side dish always served with Thanksgiving week in Lake Forest is Parent Conferences.   Monday, November 25, all Lake Forest Schools will hold conferences where, by tradition, parents meet with their child’s teachers to discuss report cards, grades, etc.

That is, everywhere but Lake Forest High School.  There, the students will lead the conference with their parents in the presence of their coach/advisor.  If there is a need to have a specific conference with a specific teacher, arrangements will be made to do that at a later date.  This is a great way to help students own their school performance.  How the student is doing, is not something adults talk about in their absence.

At Lake Forest High School, every student is assigned a faculty advisor.  There are even a few others not on the faculty who serve as advisors like Elementary Supervisory Ed Cutler and me.  We each are working with our own group of sophomores who we started advising when they were seventh graders at W.T.Chipman.

The students have been preparing for this event for a month now.  They must make decisions about which samples of their work they will share.  They must reflect on their effort and their results and share what they think they need to do better.  They will get the opportunity to script out how that conference will go and will even be given an opportunity to role play with one of their peers for practice.

It makes a lot of sense doesn’t it?  Students won’t be able to shrug their shoulders and say to their parents, “I don’t know” or “school’s OK”.  This is the second year for student led conferences at LFHS and we like it a lot.  Maybe we ought to consider this approach for middle school.