Talking to Parents, Talking to Teachers

[Music] My name is Joshua Gibbs and you're listening to In the Trenches. The Classical Teaching Institutes Pedagogy Podcast for Parents and Educators prefer common sense to theory. I was at 26 talking to parents, talking to teachers. Parent teacher conferences are coming up soon. It's that time of year. Unless you prepare for parent teacher conferences, they will not be time well spent. Parent teacher conferences can be incredibly valuable. But in my experience, they incline toward benality. You have to keep them from becoming amless and just kind of vaguely encouraging but non-committal. That's the direction that they want to go. So, how do you prepare for parent teacher conferences? That's what we're talking about in this episode. Before we get into it, big things are happening at the Classical Teaching Institute. Wheel Kilmer's Winter Latin Retreat is January 30th and 31st. Classical education has a lot of people teaching Latin. Not a lot of trained Latin teachers though. So, come to the Winter Retreat and get trained on how to teach Latin. You can find out more about Wheel Kilmer's Winter Latin Retreat at the Classical Teaching Institute.org. Most parent teacher conferences begin without a plan. Or they don't have more of a plan than we're going to see who shows up for a meeting. And when they sit down for the meeting, we're going to see what comes out of both of our mouths. Unless you plan on giving interesting information at a parent teacher conference, you're not going to. Most parent teacher conferences begin with the question, "How's my son doing?" How's my daughter doing? This big, vague question. And if someone asks that question, they haven't received word that things are going badly. Which means that nine times out of ten when someone says, "So, how's my son doing?" The answer is, "He's doing fine." There are no big problems. Not a terribly interesting thing to say though. It's not as though there are students who have huge problems and then everyone else. That's not the way that you parse out. That's not the way that you think of your students. Problematic students and everybody else. There's far more of a gradient than that. So when someone says, "How's my son doing?" They're often just checking to make sure nothing horrible is happening that they, for some reason, haven't heard about. So, "How's my son doing?" Doing fine. And then the question, "Does he participate in class?" Such a common question at parent teacher conferences. "Does my son participate in class?" And depending on where you want to go, I mean, if you want this to be a long conversation, then you can give a very nuanced answer to that question. If you don't have long conversation, chances are good, you're going to give an answer like, "Yeah, he participates in class." He asks questions every now and again. And that's going to be satisfactory. Beyond that, you might get a comment about, "I really want my son to do well this year. I want this year to be better than last year." Or, "Are you making sure that he has lots of opportunities to write? We really want our son to become a better writer." Anything big we need to talk about before I go on to the next teacher. Not really. And that's something that a lot of parent teacher conferences go. If you don't do some kind of preparation to keep that from happening, it's going to be very vague questions, very vague answers. And there is some value in the vague conversation, just because you get face time with a parent. They see you, you see them, you pair the parents face with the kids face, you recognize that parent on campus from now on. And that's worth doing. But you couldn't get so much more for your time with a little bit of preparation. So, at a certain point, I got tired of that banal conversation. Then I had over and over and over with parents. And all the parent wanted to know was that the house wasn't on fire. They wanted to know that their kid was not hanging with the bed with a wrong crowd or somehow flunking a class that the online grading system indicated that they were passing. I got tired of these and I tried to figure out how to have better conversations with parents. And one of the ways that you can prepare for parent teacher conferences is by sending an email to parents before parent teacher conferences start and tell them what kind of conversation you don't want to have. And be very upfront and say, you've been to parent teacher conferences before. Chances are good that you've sat through a five to ten minute conversation with a teacher and nothing really interesting has come out of it before. We've all had that experience. I don't want that to happen. I want to have more interesting conversations with you then. How's my son doing fine? Does he talk in class? Yeah. Make sure to give him writing homework because we want him to be a better writer. Tell parents like all that's assumed. Send a letter and tell them I need you to put some time into preparing for parent teacher conferences. I need you to have a couple conversations with your kid. So that when we sit down to talk we're more on the same page. We're not going to spend five minutes getting on to the same page. So I need you to have a couple conversations with your child before we sit down to talk. So I want to read you a letter that I have sent to parents before. An email that I've sent to parents before around ten days before parent teacher conferences. So it's sent to the entire class and it goes like this, dear parents. Before we sit down at parent teacher conferences this week, I want to give a few suggestions on how we can all get the most out of our time together. It's my experience that meetings which begin with very general questions rarely yield as much fruit as meetings with a few specific issues on the line. How is my son doing in your class is to vague a question to result in a useful exchange of information. If you have not already been contacted about unusual failures or successes in the classroom, the answer to the question, how is my son or daughter doing in your class is simply just fine. I don't have any serious concerns about their behavior or work. Rather, let me suggest a few particular questions I would like to address at parent teacher conferences. We have limited time together and just a bit of preparation can go a long way in making our conversation meaningful. So consider this. What are two or three things about your son or daughter that would be valuable for me to know but which I probably wouldn't figure out over the course of the year unless I was specifically told about them? Next, what is the most important thing you want your son or daughter to take away from my class this year? What kinds of activities do you do in your home that reinforce this school's commitment to cultivating virtue? And you might also ask your son or daughter this question before we meet. On a scale of 1 to 10, where one means I almost never participate in class. And 10 means I make strong daily contributions to class discussions. What number would you rate your own participation? Of course, I'm happy to discuss any particular questions or concerns you'd like to address. During parent teacher conferences, when I ask parents what single thing they're most desirous that their son or daughter gain over the course of the year in humanities? The most common answer is I want my son or daughter to become a better writer. This answer is so common, I think it best to address. it generally before we sit down to talk. I also want your sons and daughters to become better writers. All of the teachers at this school are responsible for making your sons and daughters better writers. No single teacher or single class is uniquely responsible for giving students writing feedback and instruction. Rather, every teacher is involved in this labor. Good writing is a manifestation of good thinking. And every teacher at this school is engaged in the work of helping your sons and daughters become more lucid and reasonable thinkers. At present, this school does not offer classes which exclusively focus on writing. Writing is a necessary component of every class. Offering a writing class would be a good bit like offering a thinking class. What's going on in rhetoric and Latin that necessitates a separate class just for thinking. Students occasionally write essays for their humanities classes, but this does not mean that humanities is a defective writing class. The primary goal of humanities class is the cultivation of virtue through reading and interpreting great literature. In as much as writing essays serve students in the cultivation of virtue, writing assignments are given. When I was in high school, I was a very competent stylist, but I was also a very shallow person. Some people might have mistakenly taken my abilities as a stylist to mean I was a good writer. However, for many years, I simply hid the shallowness of my opinions behind a well-turned phrase. If I was a good writer, I was nonetheless a poor thinker for which my soul suffered. Every teacher at this school wants far better for your sons and daughters. I look forward to talking with you later this week. Very best, Joshua Gibbs. Now, that's a letter that gives parents some specifics to consider before sitting down to talk to a teacher. It also is a somewhat polite way of saying, "I'm not interested in just having chit-chat conversations. I need to have a more substantial conversation with you and you with me in order for this to be worth our time." Most parents read the email. Most parents put together a few thoughts before sitting down to talk. I think that you need to especially push this question, tell me something about your son or daughter that I wouldn't figure out over the course of the year. In all the times that I ask that question, I nearly always go an interesting answer. So, there's a lot that you can figure out about a student over the course of a year. Just by listening to them talk before and after class, hearing them out when they explain their opinions, which commonly make reference to their lives. They have jobs, they have relationships with their grandparents, they work for their church. These are all things that you figure out over the course of the year. But when you ask a parent, "Tell me something about your son or daughter that's important that I couldn't figure out on my own." It makes the parent have to dig a little deeper and it makes the conversation seem more serious and it reflects well on you as a teacher that you care about getting the sort of personal information about students that will help you communicate more clearly with them. Now, there's preparing things on the parent side, but then there's also preparing things on the student side. So, about a week before parent teacher conferences, I send this email to parents, but I also give questionnaires to students. I love giving questionnaires. I would encourage everyone listening to this podcast. If you're a teacher with a class of 5, 10, 15 students, any time you want, any time you want to get a pulse on how kids think what they think of school, what sort of things they're into, how interested in church they are, whether they even go to church, there's nothing that keeps you from giving them a little questionnaire. When I was, I was able to say, over the last three to five years that I was a teacher, I gave students all kinds of questionnaires. Like, anytime I was curious how often kids went to church or whether they thought the mood of their school or the ethos of their school was compatible with their church and vice versa. I'd save up those questions and I'd put them in a questionnaire that I'd hand out. I was fascinating the kind of information, the kind of demographic information you get about kids, the kind of opinions that they're willing to voice, when you go to them, even if it's only in a questionnaire, and say, I want you to express yourself about some things that have nothing to do with Homer or Dante or what have you. At the beginning of the year, I hand out a personality test, not a personality test, of like a personality questionnaire based on the proust questionnaire that you can find in the back of any vanity, vanity fair magazine. That's questions about who your heroes are, who your living heroes are, who your dad heroes are, favorite books, favorite films, favorite actors. Do you have a motto? What's the most overrated virtue? I would give this personality questionnaire at the beginning of every year, fascinating the kind of stuff that kids will reveal about themselves just in talking about their favorites, favorite this favorite them. Anyway, parentage or conferences first round typically roll out in October or November, which means that the school year is well enough underway that you can ask students to reflect on how it's going. So maybe the last three or four years I was a teacher, I started giving questionnaires to students about the year that I would use later in parentage or conferences. So I would ask questions, here are some of the questions that I would ask on this exam or on this quiz questionnaire. Give me five words you would use to describe yourself as a student. That's the first question. Give me five words your peers would use to describe you. Give me five words your teachers would use to describe you. And I often follow that question up with how do your teachers misunderstand you? Give me a way in which your teachers don't get you. The answer to this question could be profound. Every now and again someone would offer a truly insightful comment on how they thought they were misrater misunderstood by teachers. Many of the answers are not terribly impressive or all that reliable. But every now and again you get some treasure in response to that question. And then I ask for some more objective self-assessment. How often do you make a question or comment in class? I'll typically give them a range of responses like several times every class, once every class, once every few classes, once a week. That's often once a week. Here's a question that I give three or four lines for students to answer. As a student, what do you bring to the table? How are you an asset to your class? If you don't ask this question of students, they're never going to consider it. Most students don't think of themselves as intellectual team players. They don't think of themselves as a student in a body of students. And the body of students has to work like a basketball team or a soccer team. Like you need someone who asks provocative questions. Someone who represents traditions. Someone who is the devil's advocate. You need all of these different players in a good class conversation. So what do you bring up the table? Why are you an asset? Why are you valuable to your class? And it's interesting to ask this question to students because there are plenty of students who don't believe they're under any obligation to be an asset to their class. They think my parents pay tuition. I'm allowed to be here, get off my back. I don't have to contribute anything. These people that I spend all day with don't need anything of me. I'm not required to give them anything. And there are students that will pass through the entirety of high school thinking of themselves as nothing more than consumers. Like in the same way, when if you walk into a grocery store, no one is going to, no employee of a grocery store is going to come up to you and say, "What?" As a customer, what do you bring to the table? Like a hundred bucks. That's what I bring to the table. Do I need to bring. more than that? Is there a conduct code at this grocery store that I wasn't aware of? What do you mean? What do I bring to the table? I bring my business. That's it. And there are plenty of students to think of themselves in the same life. I don't need to bring anything to the table. I bring me to the table. I'm a warm body and fill in this chair. Leave me alone. But when you ask a question like, what do you bring to the table? Why should anyone care that you're here? Obviously, I wouldn't ask a third or fourth grader in that question. But by the time you're in seventh, eighth, ninth grade, it's totally fair to ask a student, what do you bring to the table? What is the school be missing on days that you're sick and you can't come in? And asking students to think in those terms can be incredibly helpful. I also like to ask about favorite teachers. Who's your favorite teacher this year? What makes your favorite teacher your favorite teacher? And then how much time do you spend doing homework? How much time do you spend doing homework in the evening every night? How much do you spend doing homework every week? How much time? And then ask, where in your home do you do most of your homework? So if you find that you may find that students who spend a lot of time or report spending a lot of time doing their homework, claim that they're doing their homework in their rooms, that's a thing to bring out with parents. You might get more out of homework time if your child was sitting at the dinner table. Now when I give out these questionnaires, I collect them. I don't grade them. I hold on to them. I don't ever really have a need to give these back. But I pull these out. I pull out an individual student. I pull Tom's survey out when Tom's parents sit down for parent teacher conference. And then I have interesting information to share with Tom's parents. If the conversation starts heading in a kind of banal vague direction, I can ask the parent what words would your child use to describe himself as a student? You've got the answer sitting right there. And you can see how well the parent is capable of putting himself in the position of his child. And you can start lining up whether the child is presenting himself as a very different kind of student at home than he is at school or whether it's a fairly faithful representation. And you will find, of course, that there are plenty of students that go home and tell their parents, "Yeah, I talk regularly in class. I contribute regularly in class." And their idea of contributing regularly in class is saying something wants every other day. And it's good to know, as a parent, that your child thinks that asking a question every other day is what pulling your weight looks like in terms of class participation. Of course, parents know their children in a way that's very different than teachers know them. Parents see their children at rest. Parents are allowed to chew their kids out, call them out on things the teachers can't call them out on. At the same time, we're different at school. Children are different at school. And by the time your child is seventh grade, eighth grade, I think the most parents know this. You get a sense that your observation of your child changes them and that when you're not around, they're a little bit different. And one of the things that a good parent teacher conference can offer is not just confirmation that the house isn't burning down. A good parent teacher conference can give parents a peek at what their kids are like when there's no parent around. You could have been listening to an interesting podcast about Red House Painters singer Mark Cosalick, but you chose to listen to this one. Thank you. Your students will become like you so you must become like God. Until next time.