Mid-Year Conferences: Taking Stock and Looking Ahead
For the week before Winter Break, no learners whittled in the maker space, scribed on the whiteboards, or curled up with books in the library bean bags, but Long-View was busy nonetheless. The teachers of Long-View devoted the week to analyzing and sharing the work of our learners in mid-year conferences with their families. Along with artifact portfolios, conferences are one of the primary ways we document and communicate how children at Long-View learn.
Artifact analysis
Throughout the year, Long-View teachers study learners to understand their progress and guide instruction. We think hard, and often collaboratively, about their work. We pay attention to daily behaviors and interactions, and often document particular moments and written products through photos and videos. These digital documents, and the written products themselves, are what we call artifacts of learning.
We simultaneously assess, document and communicate progress through our work with these artifacts. For instance, on any given day, you might see a science teacher settle in with a pile of notebooks, excerpting pieces of thinking for her records about each learner and photographing pages that demonstrate intriguing currents of thought. In the next room, one literacy teacher takes video while another confers with a learner who’s in the middle of writing; they converse about how to reveal the emotion of characters in a personal narrative, not just the events. Over in math, a learner steps forward to talk through her thinking as she simplifies an expression; her teacher is recording video to capture this transitory progress for later analysis. As we craft lessons, we use this data to assess understanding and plan next steps.
In preparing for a conference, we choose several of these artifacts from each discipline that represent the child’s growth as a learner in recent months. What we feature isn’t always purely an area of strength; we also select artifacts that will inspire discussion about struggle as a part of the process of learning. This preparation has intrinsic value for us as teachers: as Mrs. Andersson, who leads Literacy Block, said, “through analyzing their work, I’m able to set new goals for them as learners.” She goes into the spring semester “knowing the goals and where I want to nudge them forward.”
Conference as collaboration
We were excited to hold most conferences in person this year. In masks and socially distanced, parents and teachers sat down on Long-View’s red sofas to view the slides of artifacts that we’d prepared. Projected brighter and larger than life, the artifacts conveyed the importance that we attribute to children’s work in learning. Teachers shared the insights we’d gleaned from our analysis, and parents had equal footing in that they, too, could see and comment on the thinking on display. Mr. Cooley, who leads Science Block, observed that “it was good to have a sense of how the learners are in other spaces.” Dr. Flider, who leads Literacy Block, added that analyzing artifacts “helps me formulate a theory of the child, and the dynamics of the conversation with the parent inform that understanding.” Conferences give us a chance to articulate these larger theories about the children as learners across disciplines, including commentary on the social dimension of their lives at Long-View. As teachers, we learned so much. Ms. Fleury, another leader of Literacy Block, reflected that because these collaborative conversations “gave this different perspective, compared to what I see with the learners at school every day, I just felt more connected afterward.”
Now that learners are back from winter break, we’ve started the next round of gathering and analyzing data, with the ongoing work of formative assessment built into the model. Another set of conferences and the more formal process of compiling artifact portfolios lies ahead of us this spring. Invigorated by our experiences talking with families and taking stock of what we accomplished in the first half of this year, we can’t wait to see what Long-View learners will explore, critique and imagine this spring.
