Our son recently started kindergarten and we just had the opportunity to partake in our first parent-teacher conference. It was a meeting that we were looking forward to, and since our son had no pre-school prior to starting kindergarten, we wanted the meeting to be as constructive and informative as possible.
With just 20 minutes to meet with his teacher (since there are 23 students in his class), we didn’t have much time to have a good information exchange; therefore, we did certain things to maximize the time that we have with our first parent-teacher conference.
Acknowledging Weak Points
Again, acknowledging the time constraints we were under for this first meeting, I wanted the teacher to feel that she could be open and honest with us relatively quickly. I didn’t want her spending the whole meeting beating around the bush and trying to mince words on any issues our son might be having. He is very smart and a good boy, but show me a kid without issues of some sort to work on and I’ll show you a parent that is being less than forthright about their child.
Therefore, early on in the meeting, I pointed out several things that we were having issues with at home — listening, sitting quietly, task completion — in hopes of showing the teacher that we were aware and honest about things we’ve been working on. In our opinion, the point of such parent-teacher meetings it to learn about and look for solutions to issues, and getting to the meat of these issues quickly allows us to spend more time focusing on finding possible fixes.
Proper Give and Take
With only 20 minutes to talk, our poor kindergarten teacher sounded more like a speed talker than a teacher as she tried to get in all that she had to tell us. However, while we were content to listen and learn to a point, we also wanted to provide her with feedback as well. We felt that by giving her a little background about us and our family, it might help her understand how best to help our son. Knowing that he hadn’t gone to pre-school, what we’d been focusing on in his learning, our backgrounds in childhood education, and similar information could help her better understand how to help our son in the classroom and what to focus on moving forward.
One way or another, we wanted to show our support for the teacher. Having 23 five-year-olds — even for just half a day — under her tutelage must be exhausting, and any way we can help at home through continuing education will hopefully make her job easier. Therefore, we remained open to her ideas and ask her opinion on the educational steps that we’ve already taken in an effort to let her know that we are willing to help out where necessary.
Reviewing with our Son
After the parent teacher conference, we had a better understanding of where our son is excelling and where he needs improvement. This is great information for us to have, but we feel it’s important to communicate this information to our son as well in an effort to get him on the same page and help him work on things. Letting our son know that it’s not just his parents that are seeing these things, but his teacher as well, seems to have an effect. Parents are parents, but he looks at his teacher in a different way, so hearing the same feedback coming from her seems to almost have a greater impact. Therefore, we sat down with our son after our conference and went through the feedback from his teacher — both good and bad — so that he knows that he is doing great but that there are still areas of improvement upon which to work.
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