Parent-teacher meetings are an important part of the academic year for teachers, parents and students alike. In the majority of cases, a parent-teacher meeting may be the only time that a parent and a teacher meet throughout the entire year so it’s important to get it right.
For parents, the goal is simple — to learn about their child. Parents want to know about their child’s strengths and weaknesses. They want to know how they’ve been progressing, what areas that they need to work on, and their general behaviour. Great parent-teacher meetings are intentional and focus on how well the student is doing in school and how they could be doing even better. For teachers, parent teacher conferences present a unique challenge. You want to provide feedback that satisfies the aforementioned needs of the parents but you do not want that feedback to be misinterpreted as critical or judgemental.
In the past few years, the Athena Tracker has proved itself to be a powerful tool for parent-teacher meetings. While the Athena Tracker is cloud-based, teachers can print out a PDF of a student’s profile for these meetings. Whether used offline as a PDF or viewed together on the dashboard, the software facilitates open and honest discussions that are based on data. The software also provides a solid foundation for parent-teacher conferences as the entire flow of the conversation can be built around reviewing the student’s Athena Tracker profile in a friendly, non-confrontational manner.
Below we will look at some of the reasons why the Athena Tracker is the perfect accompaniment for parent-teacher discussions.
1. Provide Structure to Parent Teacher Meetings
“The Athena Tracker presents information in a very user-friendly format, which is incredibly important. It’s used when our year heads are speaking to students directly, which is often a quite challenging space to carve out. We use the Athena Tracker framework as the starting point for conversations about a student’s performance. But, equally, parent-teacher meetings have become more effective as the Athena Tracker provides a way to demonstrate to parents, particularly in a DEIS setting, how their son or daughter is getting on.”
Niall McVeigh, Principal
Sometimes, when holding parent-teacher meetings, it can be difficult to know where to begin. However, when the Athena Tracker is the focal point of the discussion, there is a natural structure built-in.
Together, teachers and parents can sit down and review the student’s Athena Tracker profile as a starting point. They can look at historical exam results and spot trends that are emerging. They can review their most recent exams and their baseline potential grade for each subject. If targets have been put in place, teachers and parents can review any aspirational targets that a student may have and, if the student is in their senior cycle, they can see how many CAO points they are on track to achieve. The Athena Tracker becomes the jumping off point for many interesting topics and effective discussions.
2. Contextualise Exam Results and Remove Ambiguity
A parent in Borrisokane Community College said that the Athena Tracker “takes the whole mystery out of it for parents”. She went on to describe how her daughter, Niamh, was showing a downward trend in Maths and she took that data on board. “She’s realised that she needs to up her game here. She knows herself, we know, and, obviously, the school knows. This provides us with reassurance and peace of mind.”
This brings us on to one of the most valuable uses of the Athena Tracker when speaking to parents — allowing teachers to give context to exam results. During parent-teacher meetings, teachers can go through recent results and then show how these results compare to a student’s baseline potential and whether they are below, above or in-line with that potential. This removes ambiguity and allows for objective feedback that is based purely on the data at hand.
During the discussion, teachers can present a graph that shows a student’s actual results, their baseline potential and the gap between both. This provides a parent with an immediate visual representation of where their child stands. If the student is below their potential, the teacher can carefully communicate what needs to be done to get back on track.
3. Highlight Wins and Reassure Parents
As well as highlighting when a student is below their potential, the Athena Tracker can also show when a student is tracking above their potential, even when not necessarily achieving top grades. This can be extremely reassuring for parents who may never have been shown results in this type of context and may have previously been unsure of how to feel about their results or the level of effort that their child has been putting in.
4. Using Notes as Discussion Prompts and Reminders
For a teacher, one of the keys to holding an effective parent-teacher meeting is to come prepared for each conversation and have notes ready in advance.
As well as displaying their academic tracking data, the Athena Tracker also allows teachers to record notes throughout the year. These notes can act as discussion prompts for parent-teacher meetings.
Using this notes feature throughout the year can save teachers a huge amount of time in the weeks leading up to the parent-teacher conferences, which may otherwise have been spent preparing notes for each student from scratch.
5. Promote an Environment of Productive Discussion
With the Athena Tracker, it’s very much a case of show don’t tell. By reviewing the Athena Tracker together, teachers can give objective feedback that is purely based on data, with the evidence clearly displayed in front of them in black and white. If a student is tracking below their potential, both parties can see it.
This, again, removes any ambiguity and facilitates friendly, open and honest conversations where parents and teachers can work collaboratively to put an action plan in place.
If you would like to learn about some other ways that the Athena Tracker is being used, check out this article about how schools have been Reimagining Student Awards With the Athena Tracker.
