Scammon Bay Principal Melissa Rivers writes:
As a school principal, I LOVE to experiment. It probably stresses my staff out, but if we aren’t trying new things, we are never moving the dial, and I’m not OK with our school not making progress.
A couple of years ago, we were looking at our parental involvement during parent/teacher conferences. We noticed that we were seeing less than 10% of our families for conferences (and 90% of those who showed up were school staff). I knew we needed to do better.
We set up Family Nights, where we group up teachers to have some sort of learning activity in their classroom. Families can go from class to class, and during that time, we also pass out our report cards. If parents have questions or want to talk to the teachers about their child’s report card, they can step out into the hallway or go to a different room. Because the teachers are working in groups, there are still a couple of teachers facilitating the fun learning activity even when one teacher steps out to talk with a parent. We have seen huge success. We’re getting anywhere between 80 to 120 people at our Family Nights.
This was a huge experiment, and it had the possibility of failing, but luckily, it didn’t. I will never go back to the traditional parent/teacher conferences again.