parent communication Archives

On “Reportese”, Teacher Comments & Saying What We Mean

So, this popped up in my Twitter feed last week:

“Kate struggles to apply herself” Code for: “she’s lazy”. What phrases do you use on reports & what do they really mean?Share @GuardianTeach

— GuardianTeach (@GuardianTeach) April 13, 201

I often see things pop up via non-teacher friends on Facebook who have school age kids that are in the vein of “what your child’s teacher says, and what she really means”. I know these things exist, but every time I see teachers engaging in them, I’m a bit shocked. As both a middle school teacher and as a teacher educator, I am fairly invested in the language we use when we talk about students and in helping others to use that language. That said, I do see how, as Kevin Bartlett calls it, “reportese” can end up feeling like a the punchline of a joke. And we really should be able to laugh at ourselves. But I still have some problems with these lists, partially because the “what the teacher really means” generally makes us sound like insensitive jerks, rather than people who care about kids and their progress.

There are reasons why in teacher comments, we try to phrase things positively:

We’re trying to focus on observable behaviors or what a student has reported and withhold judgment. It’s impossible to know what’s going on in someone else. Educators do have the training to look at a number of different sources of data and make inferences about motivation, ability, and skill in our students. But those observable behaviors are just the tip of the iceberg. I don’t want to make an inference about what’s causing a student’s behavior until I’m absolutely sure.
We know that if we talk about things in a positive manner, rather than using terms like “lazy” we’re more likely to keep a positive mindset about the student and to look for ways to help her improve. It’s my job to figure out how to teach all of the students in my class, and my job to collaborate with parents to help students improve. It’s also my job to help leverage and develop student strengths (such as being social and enjoying collaboration), as well as to help students improve in areas of weakness (knowing when it’s time to work independently).

But, in spite of our best efforts, the comments often seem jargony and designed to be unclear or vague and hide what’s really going on with the student. For example, saying that “Kate struggles to apply herself”, doesn’t give much insight into Kate’s behavior, her strengths, or her weaknesses. The reason comments like this are seen as duplicitous or or disingenuous–like, well, we really mean that Kate is lazy and are afraid we’ll get in trouble for calling it like we see it–is that they’re so vague. Is Kate completing classwork, but having difficulty following up with homework? Does she participate fully in class discussions, but doesn’t do very well when she’s asked to write about a topic independently? How can we still maintain a non-judgmental voice that talks about students in a positive way, but still be specific and realistic about a student’s accomplishments?

Write your comment to the student–not to next year’s teacher and not to the parent. One of my colleagues gave me this idea, and I’m trying to use it more in my practice. Parent communication is a big part of report writing, but it shouldn’t be our only avenue. When we write to the student (even if someone else needs to read it to them), we (or at least I) seem to shift into more understandable, honest-sounding language. This is, of course, totally different than what I ask my grad students to do (sorry, everyone–clinical language is the program standard).
Be genuine with your compliments. Find something good–improvement, positive attitude, enthusiasm, and start with it. Don’t qualify it. Just say it.
Start with observations, and then infer or question. Don’t just jump right in with the inferences about student needs or motivation. Talk about what you’re seeing in a clear and non-judgmental way, and then talk about why you think it’s happening.
Set goals and offer solutions. How will the whole team (teacher, student, and parent) work together to get the student on track? Or to help the student extend her thinking or expand his creativity?

How do you make sure you’re clearly communicating in your written reports? Do you like the idea of writing directly to the student? Or do you think reports should be directed toward parents?

Digital Portfolios Go To Parent-Teacher Conferences

One of my goals when I started using digital portfolios in my 6th grade class was to improve communication with parents, and though I have my students email their parents every time they add an update, I’m not sure how often they look at them. Parent-teacher conferences seemed like a great time to show off the work and reflection that my students have been doing this year, and I’ve had some of the best conferences ever because of it.

Concrete Examples of Learning

Each students’ digital portfolio contains artifacts: videos, embedded Google docs, snapshots of the learning process, student-created image slideshows that show the steps in the process up to creating a final product. We try to use all the digital tools at our disposal to document the learning process. With these, we’re able to demonstrate a student’s growth and learning in ways that just weren’t possible with traditional portfolios. The portfolios contained mostly qualitative data (although some quantitative was included, like spelling assessments), so artifacts of the learning process that aren’t final, completed projects are included. For example, students have chosen to add snapshots of anchor charts in the classroom and used these as one piece of evidence that they are starting to implement a strategy, along with a snapshot of an annotated reading passage. My favorite example is a student included a video of himself attempting (and failing) to explain his process for solving a problem (complete with the student recording it in the background saying “Dude–I don’t think guess and check is a valid strategy here”), and then explaining how he can improve in his reflection. Not only did this provide parents with concrete examples of the learning process, they also provided a glimpse into their child’s self-reflection and growth. During the conferences, I was able to use these artifacts to discuss progress with parents and demonstrate student learning and growth.

Promoting a Growth Mindset for Students and Parents

When I talk to colleagues about trying to promote a growth mindset amongst their students, parental expectations are often a hurdle. By setting up our digital portfolios so they were a documentation of students’ growth and progress over time toward specific goals, I was able to communicate to parents the importance of perseverance, self-reflection, and positive self-talk in the learning process. Rather than the conversation focusing on what the student wasn’t doing, the conversation was focused on what they were doing and the progress that they had made, however incremental it might have been, toward their goals. That shift in conversation, I think, relates to the transparency that comes from the digital portfolio. Parents have access to artifacts of student learning, as well as what the students learned from the experience (in their own words). That’s a pretty powerful combination.

Overall, I think that the digital portfolios made for a better set of parent-teacher conferences this year, both because of what my students created and what parents were able to take from them.

How have you used your digital portfolios to facilitate communication with parents?

Getting Started with Digital Portfolios

Front page of one of our digital portfolios — The front page of one student’s digital portfolio.

This year I’m piloting digital portfolios with my M2 (grade 6) class. I noticed last year that there wasn’t a lot of communication between the Learning Support program and parents. There aren’t really grades, and there’s the occasional email, but more often than not, no work goes home. Most of the work that parents do see are the results scaffolding and specialized graphic organizers, and other supplements and complements to classroom instruction. Last year, in my first year in the position, with the help of my principal we added more transparency by creating learning plans for students that contained goals for the skills that would be addressed during the school year (I know, for those of you in public schools this is SOP, but it something that seems to be slowly becoming a part of international schools). I thought this was great, but I wanted to do more. Then I got connected to Matt Renwick through Twitter and his blog, and started reading his book Digital Student Portfolios. I decided to create digital portfolios that were primarily designed to show growth, but that could be used to showcase certain pieces of work or activities that students were particularly proud of. I wanted to use digital portfolios as an opportunity to create a dialogue with students and parents about growth, and to continue to build a culture of self-reflection for learning in my classroom.

The first challenge I faced was finding the right platform to use to create the digital portfolios. My school has a pretty strict “no use of 13 and over programs and apps by students under 13” policy, so Evernote, the platform Matt discusses in his book, was out. The school’s Tech Integrator and I discussed Google Sites, Blogger (both part of our school’s Google Apps for Education subscription) or Weebly. I ended up dismissing Blogger because I wouldn’t be able to house several blogs on the same page, and I knew that teaching students how to effectively use tags would take a while. After making two sample portfolios, one in Weebly and one in Google Sites, I decided that Weebly would work best for my purposes and be easiest for the students to use. So far, I would recommend this as a platform.

Benefits

Weebly is really easy to use. It’s uses a drag and drop system to add pictures, buttons, URLs, and HTML code. I even taught my students how to embed Google Docs in their Weebly blogs (something I had thought would be easier with Google Sites).
Not having the easy-embed function from Google Sites led to a mini-lesson on HTML, which the students seemed to enjoy.
The school’s educator account provides some measure of privacy and security for students. Their sites are password protected.
If students forget passwords, etc they are all managed by our Instructional Technology department.
It’s easy for students to personalize and make their own.
It’s easy to share with parents and for them to navigate.
Creating individual blogs for each goal allows us easily see progress on individual goals, and the most recent activity (that, I hope, represents the students’ current progress toward the goal) is at the top of the page.
The blog format allows me, their classroom teachers, their parents, and, if they choose, their peers, to comment on the work that they share and ask questions about it.

Drawbacks

Weebly is extremely customizable, which is a good thing. I want students to take ownership of their portfolios I had to get through a few classes of students playing around with the design of their website, which was OK, but often what they thought of as a “good design” made their message difficult to understand. I think the next time I do this, I need to spend a bit more time on the front end integrating instruction on how design can influence the audience’s ability to understand our message, maybe using specific websites (possibly even my own) as examples.
Although there is a way for the student and I to be co-owners of a Weebly site, the Tech Integrator and I haven’t been able to make it work yet. This is something that would have been much easier with Google Sites or with Blogger, but I think the ease of use more than makes up for this.
The one blog per goal set up makes it more difficult to use tags to see connections between assignments and activities that match up to multiple goals.
Next year, I need to do a better job reviewing the difference between personal online communication and professional online communication (particularly editing one’s work before posting it online–see the spelling error above).

Overall, I have been completely blown away by all the things that I could do with a digital portfolio that I wouldn’t have been able to do with a traditional portfolio. I had just assumed that a digital portfolio would be a substitution for a physical portfolio or it would be an augmentation, adding some functional improvement, but not significantly different from the physical version. I am, however, starting to see that digital portfolios are really modifications of traditional portfolios, allowing my students, their parents, and me to do things that weren’t possible with the original paper format. I’m excited to continue our work and I’ll keep you updated as I keep working with the students on building their portfolios.

Have you used digital portfolios? What have been your successes? Learning experiences?