The Potomac Highlands Dispatch - the online newspaper

By The Potomac Highlands Dispatch
MOUNT SAVAGE, Feb. 2 -- For the first time in Allegany County public schools, students are leading the discussion with their parents about work they've completed during the previous marking period.

At Bel Air and Mount Savage elementary schools, students on Wednesday began the process of taking parents through classroom assignments and touching on strengths and weaknesses in reading, math and behavior. It's the start of a pilot program initiated here by David Cox, district superintendent, who brought the idea with him from his previous school district in Virginia.

Mount Savage Elementary implemented the first-time effort with all 220 students and 11 teachers in grades kindergarten through fifth grade. Bel Air Elementary tested the concept with all 40 of its fifth-grade students and about 15 students, or nearly half, at the fourth grade level.

Autumn Eirich, Bel Air principal, said both students and parents were prepared for the new process, in which the teacher is merely on-call to facilitate discussion when needed.

Eirich and Shannon Imes, Mount Savage Elementary assistant principal, said the first day of student-led conferences were drawing mixed reviews from both parents and teachers alike.

Imes said parents seemed to enjoy watching their child relay how well, or not, they did in reading, match or behavior guidelines. But those parents still expected that private discussion with the teacher.

Eirich said while there was likely much positive to gleam from the experience, the potential increases demand on teachers' times is a possible concern as parents might want to schedule a second meeting to meet only with the teacher.

"They still want to meet one-on-one with the teacher," Eirich said after researching the concept. "Now, that's another meeting for the teacher. That's hard to sell."

That approach goes against the grain of the purpose of student-led conferences, a trend apparently gaining momentum across the nation.

"This practice is the biggest breakthrough in communications about student achievement in the last century," said Rich Stiggins, an education consultant and Phi Delta Kappan, was quoted as saying to the Indiana public school system. "when students are well-prepared over an extended period to tell the story of their own success (or lack thereof), they seem to experience a fundamental shift in their internal sense of responsibility for that success. The pride in accomplishment that students feel when they have positive story to tell and tell it well can be immensely motivational. The sense of personal responsibility that they feel when anticipating what it will be like to face the music of having to tell their story of poor achievement can also drive them to productive work."

In Sarah O'Neal's third-grade classroom at Mount Savage, students and their parents were kept in separate corners for privacy. Students were given a checklist of items to cover during the session and a folder of school work that had been gathered during the marking period.

The work covered material in reading, writing and math as well as behavior guidelines. O'Neal was available to parents and students as requested. And parent Melanie Hunt, with son Jacob, thought everything went well. Still, "I think they need to go back to standard, private conversations where the teacher's more involved," Melanie Hunt said.

Hunt said she understood that the teacher was essentially not to be involved. O'Neal went above and beyond, she said, to answer questions. But that's counter to the concept of student-led conferences as it was explained to her.

"I think it's good that the child has to evaluate themselves," she said.

By all accounts, Jacob is doing well in school. But there could be instances in which the conversations, which take place in multiple corners of the classroom, could be a bit more sensitive.

"To me, it's not a whole lot different than what I do with him at home," Hunt said of today's procedure. "But what if there's a child that isn't" doing as well as Jacob?

Both schools plan to acquire feedback from teachers and parents and, later this month, meet with district officials to discuss the pros and cons of student-led conferences.

But Eirich's first impressions were of the process working only in middle school and beyond when the students had learned a greater level of maturity and responsibility. Research, freely available on the web, supports that notion.

And after the first few hours, "my thought is, if they feel this is something that can work," then it just might be a good thing.