Student led conferences aren't new, but they seem to be gaining steam. I've taken some tentative steps in this direction as I invite students to parent conferences. But this is a baby-step and I likely can't go further without institutional support.
I'm interested in what the research says about student led conferences. Are they effective? Why should schools adopt them?
Some research suggests that parents don't particularly find traditional parent-teacher conferences all that useful and instead find them to be stressful and time-consuming. But I digress.
There were some intriguing results. Before diving into them, I want to note that these results don't measure "soft skills" nor do they examine any of the other alleged but seemingly obvious benefits of slcs such as student agency, ownership, and having students parents and teachers all on the same page (literally and figuratively). Instead, these results look at student achievement the subjects of math, Dutch and English. Interestingly, it seems that math scores improved more than the language subject scores for students who led conferences. Boys received a greater benefit than girls. And low achieving students, boys in particular, saw the greatest improvement when contrasted with the control group.
I don't think the study fully accounts for the variable that is the portfolio. Indeed, how important a role does the preparation for the conference- the building of a personal learning portfolio- play in the success? The metacognitive process of portfolio building would seem to have benefits whether or not it was created for a conference.
I'm not surprised that the low-achieving students saw the most improvement. One reason of course is that high-achieving students have less room to improve. There is a cap to highest scores. Yet, I can't help but thinking that student led conferences encourage (okay force) disaffected and disengaged students to participate in their schooling.
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