#IDEAcon 2020

Participants will walk away with the knowledge, resources and confidence to transform their traditional parent teacher conferences into a productive meeting that honors each participants' role, highlights students' strengths and weaknesses, focuses on student performance data, fosters a continuous cycle of improvement, and creates a partnership of collaboration and mutual respect. During the session, participants will be introduced to multiple digital tools for curating and presenting student artifacts, explore advantages/drawbacks, and discuss creative ways to implement digital portfolios with limited access to technology. In addition, participants will learn how to select and collect artifacts along with legal considerations educators and administrators should be aware of as a digital tool is selected to aggregate artifacts. Members will receive a brief overview of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and their responsibilities in protecting student data. Participants from the audience will be enlisted to participate in multiple demonstrations of student led conferences to observe how to facilitate a conversation that models a cycle of continuous improvement in which the parent and student are key stakeholders. Participants will learn how to support parents who are confrontational, shift blame, belittle their child, feel helpless/hopeless/powerless, or believe unfounded assumptions(I was never good at math, so my child will never be good at math). Student led parent teacher conference are an invaluable tool to advance student learning which can be used throughout the year not just during quarterly conference dates established by school districts.