As we already know, families are a target of the counseling work. It is very important to encourage and motivate families in their children's learning process and let them participate in the activities of the centre, creating a good environment.
Today's class we have leartn how to run a good parent-teacher conference. This is a meeting between the parents and the teacher to discuss and exchange any information about the children educational, behaviral and personal progress and development. It also serves to try to solve any problem in the most effective way.
- Welcome the parents:
- Talk about the positive aspects of the student first, then the bad ones.
- Have material ready to show.
- Improve the sucess of the student with homework.
- Let the parents know what are exactly the materials their child usually uses.
- Bring a portfolio of the student's work.
- Send home-sheets with questions for the parents.
- Know very well your objectives.
- Prepare students for conference.
- It is good that parent takes notes.
- State the purpose and the time for the conference.
- Describe the child's progress in major areas and ask how they feel about child's progress.
- Set mutual goals and establish timelines for goals.
- Summarize (thanks for coming, set another meeting day...).
- Evaluate confefence: follow up with students and follow up with parents.
Then, we saw a video of a Spanish bad run parent-teacher conference. In this one, almost none of this tips were taken in account. The counselor and the mother were stand up all the time, the language used was plenty of reprovals and the climate was very tense.
Finally, we made a participative activity, which consisted on recreating some typical and common parent-teacher conference situations. Some of the played different roles (parent, counselor or teacher) and we had to act such as.
Personally I participate in one of the performances.
These are the characters:
Ricardo and Ana: They have got a child who is victim from bullying. They both are very worried and excited, particularly Ricardo.
Claudia is the teacher and I am the counselor (Esmeralda). We both have to give a solution for their children.
The first thing we did was transmit them calm and conficence as we are professionals. Then, we propose them a meeting between both children - the bully and her child, the victim- because this is the first step in this kind of situations.
We also explain them carefully that it is very important that children by themselves have to learn to solve this situations and improve their coexistence, because sometimes parents make the problem bigger.
This class has served us very much to know more about how to develop a future parent-teacher conference in an accurate way. We now are consciouss of the difficulty of this task, although it wasn't a real situation.
