Parent-Teacher Conferences: Fetch or Flop?

Parent-teacher conferences can be a source of anxiety, excitement, or curiosity for students at any school. But for Stanford OHS students, whose parent-teacher conferences are upcoming at the end of October (to be exact,October 30th through November 1st), this normal mid-term ritual has certain differences to brick-and-mortar schools, precipitated by both OHS’s “online”ness and its global reach.

Many get excited for parent-teacher conferences, like Julia Holmes, a full-time senior student at OHS. “Personally, I enjoy parent-teacher conferences…it is important for my parents to be a part of my academic journey…I love receiving feedback from my teachers.” A parent-teacher conference can be an excellent litmus test beyond a numerical grade—how a teacher personally thinks your content mastery and skills in a given subject are developing, what you can work on, and how to improve—and communicating all this information to parents can be invaluable.

But one may wonder whether parent-teacher conferences can reveal anything significant about their performance besides reporting on that grade, a grade otherwise easily accessible in PowerSchool. This worry could be especially prevalent in courses that do not lean heavily on in-class participation, like certain STEM subjects, therefore limiting the development of student-teacher relationships and any meaningful feedback to parents at the end of October. 

Another concern for parent-teacher conferences for a school with a global student body is language barriers. While many OHS teachers are bi and trilingual, some even polyglots (!), and come from a variety of diverse cultural and geographical backgrounds, many instructors only speak English. Some OHS parents, both in the United States and especially abroad, are not native English speakers. One student in their third year at OHS shared: “We’ve done parent-teacher conferences every year…my mom has to relay her messages through my dad,” (who is not a native English speaker either) “...and they prefer to have something written beforehand so they can reliably get everything across. My mom also needs my dad to translate after the meeting is over.” Could OHS make things easier for non-English speaking parents in conferences in the future? Forthcoming real-time translation AI is one future option.

OHS promotes independence in its students, both in difficult and challenging coursework and a college-style schedule. It is a student’s responsibility to log on to Adobe Connect, submit homework on Canvas, participate in general—no one is being dropped off by their parents in the morning at a physical school building. OHS students have both more freedom and greater responsibility when it comes to their education. That being said, in a school that encourages student-led learning almost as a charism, are parent-teacher conferences still applicable? Would not student-teacher conferences be more fitting in an environment that grants students so much autonomy and responsibility? Connor Decatur, a junior, said that: “...given the unique environment…it would make sense to have more student teacher conferences. Most of our learning is self-driven at OHS and encourages us to develop good relationships with our teachers.” Julia Holmes presented an alternative idea: “...a few minutes at the end of each parent-teacher conference…devoted to a productive discussion between the student and the teacher.”

Even as we prepare for the second part of the fall semester and undergo parent-teacher conferences, we should consider what makes OHS special and what could be better.