2.+Student+led+Conferences

=Our district runs optional spring conferences based on teacher or parent requests. We wanted to give all students the opportunity to share their progress with their families. This is why the student led conferences are so powerful. Even the students who need one on one formal conferences have the opportunity to share their own work and reflect on it with their families after the formal conference. Below is a letter that is sent home to families explaining the process.= =Last year Erin and I worked on developing student led conference Power Points. She had not done a student led conference before and we spoke about ways to get students thinking about their learning and reflecting on their progress. I shared a template I had given students in previous years to guide them through creating the slides for each academic area. She worked with her students on creating a list of topics and skills they had worked on throughout the trimester. These were created as reference tools as the students thought about their own learning.= = = =Erin and I spoke about logistics, since the previous projects were shared by student teams they saved their work on a communal server space. This time students would need to save their work and download photos to their own server space. We utilized the cameras we had bought with technology funds form this grant. Students were able to sit with their family members and at times, speak in their native language, as they shared their progress during the past reporting period.=

= = =This year, she is looking at ways to expand the presentations to incorporate video. That is where our work is currently. She has also taken on the role of mentor to her own grade level team members. This year all third grade classes participated in the stduent led conference format and were very impressed with the results.=

Click [|HERE]to see a video about our process!
Here is the template we used: [|student led conference.pot] Family letter explaining conferences: [|spring conf letter.doc]

Student samples of Power Points: [|Amber Meinke.pptm] [|lauren.ppt]