• How can schools encourage students to accept personal responsibility for their academic performance and progress?

• How can we teach the process of self-evaluation and reflection?

• How do we increase parental engagement in learning?

During Learning Frontiers workshops, the student led conference has been prototyped as a multi-component tool with widespread potential application in Australian schools.

Drawing on work underway in other Hub schools such as Birdwood High School, Australian Science and Mathematics School and Campbelltown Performing High School, a toolkit for scaling and transferring this practice will be developed.

STUDENT-LED CONFERENCESTransforming traditional parent-teacher interviews

A suite of tools to support the replacement of parent-teacher interviews with student-led conferences.

Study Coaches

• Before: support students to prepare, check on bookings

• During: ask prompting questions; focus conference on student; reflect and celebrate on student learning

• After: follow up on planning and agreed actions; reflect with the student and endorse their effort

Students:

• Before: prepare digital portfolio via a Google site; complete reflection tasks; prepare parents

• During: bring your own device for presentation; present portfolio to parents and study coaches

• After: reflect with study coaches; follow up on agreed actions; submit reflection form

Parents and carers:

• Before: book the conference; encourage students to prepare their portfolios

• During: listen to and support the student

• After: reflect with students; follow up on agreed actions; submit the reflection form

Local test sites: Amaroo School (ACT), Birdwood High School (SA)

Learning Frontiers Hubs: Across the regional Hubs, a number of schools are using SLCs to increase student, parent and teacher engagement

Amaroo School is a P-10 school in the ACT and Amaroo School is the largest public school in the ACT with an enrolment of 1740 Students. Student Led Conferences (SLCs) have been introduced across the senior school, involving 290 students in Years 9 and 10.

Student-led conferences encourage:

• students to do most of the talking, not teachers or parents

• teachers and parents to reflect on and celebrate student learning and academic achievement

• students to set goals, self-evaluate and prepare themselves as independent, metacognitive learners.

A snapshot of student led conference data from 2014 at Amaroo School showed that:

• 80% of parents who responded found student led conference discussions useful.

• 78% of parents found discussions around their child’s strengths, areas for improvement and future directions useful.

• 87% of parents (and 80% who responded) thought student led conferences would be more beneficial in Semester 1 as opposed to Semester 2.

• 100% of staff found the student led conferences to be a valuable experience.

In Term 2 2015, Year 9 and 10 students at Amaroo ran their own student-led conferences. Each student prepared a script to present and discuss their learning. To inform the discussion, students created and referred to a digital portfolio, built on a Google site. The creation of this digital portfolio was scaffolded with the creation of a ‘resource site’ that provided templates for students, information for the community, and a research context.

This portfolio contained:

• a piece of work they were proud of

• a piece of work they would like to improve on

• reflections on these two pieces

• other items added to demonstrate their learning at Amaroo school (videos, photos and other media).

“It has provided more focus on student learning by requiring the student to generate the feedback about their learning to their parents. As well, it has increased participation of parents who are keen to allow their children the opportunity to showcase their learning at school … As result of the successes we have experienced we will be examining student led conferences for

use across more areas of our school.”

Richard Powell, Principal, Amaroo School

THE STORY SO FAR WHO NEEDS TO BE INVOLVED

WHAT WILL HAPPEN NEXT

FEATURES AND ELEMENTS

Preparation

Evidence library

Digital portfolio

Reflect

Support sessions

Reflection tasks

Prompting questions

Follow-up actions

Guiding scripts

Guiding scripts

Reflection tool

Checklists

Video illustrations

Student voice

Data from conferences Research

base

Proud Improve

Feedback

Online booking system

“Students took ownership of their learning goals and what they needed to do in order to achieve them.” Teacher. Amaroo School

MORE INFORMATION: www.studentconferencetool.edublogs.org Contact: studentconferencetool@gmail.com