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Student-led Portfolio Conferences
One of the fundamental purposes of education today is to build a community of learners. To prepare our children and our community for the changing demands of the twenty-first century, we need to build our capacity to learn, not just as individuals, but together as a community. In the ASFG Middle School, we are working to support the development of our students as independent learners, prepared to take on the challenges of the twenty-first century. Yet, we know that our students can only be successful as individuals given the support of a learning community, which we have been building together with our student portfolios and Student-Led Portfolio Conferences.
In addition to bringing our learning community together to share responsibility for our students’ learning, the purposes of Student-Led Portfolio Conferences include developing and promoting:
- Student’s self-esteem and confidence in their ability to learn,
- Student’s responsibility for their own learning and work products,
- Student’s meta-cognition, which is the ability to reflect on one’s own thinking in order to understand how one learns,
- Student’s goal-directed behavior through the reflection and goal-setting process,
- Student’s communication and critical-thinking skills,
- Parent-student communication,
- Parent’s active involvement in the overall education process,
- Increased parent participation in school conferences (95-100%),
- A climate of celebration for learning and the learning process.
Our conferences are organized in a multiple-family format, in which up to four family conferences take place at a time in classrooms, which are decorated with student art work produced in their art classes. At their conference, each student introduces their parent(s) to their Advisory teacher and then sits down at a group of tables where they lead their parents through their student portfolio. Parents participate in the conference in a number of ways, including asking their student questions about their work, about their learning styles and preferences, about their overall learning for the year, and about their goals for the future. At the end of the conference, parents are given a class-work assignment to write their student a “Thank-You note”, complimenting them on their work and their learning.
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