Student-led Conferences and Digital Portfolios

    
    Student-led conferences are a wonderful way to allow students to showcase their work to parents or guardians. Much like a typical parent-teacher conferences, this is how students’ guardians get to see what their child is doing at school. Both types of conferences allow guardians to see progress that their child has made based off of work samples and data. The great difference about student-led conferences is that the students get to showcase the work that they deem important. They get to showcase the things that they are most proud of and activities that they enjoyed the most. When students show the work that they have done, whether it was good or bad, they are held accountable and are able to take charge of their own learning.

     Students may be provided with guidelines as to what they showcase for the conference, but ultimately, they are the one that dictates work showcased during the conference. Guidelines that may be set up for the conference are in the number of work samples that must be provided to the parent or guardian, the subjects that are represented by the work samples, and that they must reflect on each piece of work showcased. The teacher’s main job is to facilitate and to provide the expectations for the assignments that were given.

    
  A great thing to build for use during the meeting is a digital portfolio. A digital portfolio is an environmentally friendly way to keep track of all of the student’s work samples. They provide easy access to all of the documents and save paper and space. The student will need to be familiar with the work that is saved in their portfolio so that they are able to talk about it. The best thing about a digital portfolio is that it can be used across many subjects, classes, and even grades. This portfolio can easily travel with students throughout their entire education experience. It can be a comprehensive view of student learning and growth.

     In my future classroom, I will make the most of both student-led conferences digital portfolios. I want my students to be able to keep track of what they are learning with assistance rather than me doing it all for them. This allows them to pick what they think is important and what they enjoyed doing the most. During student-led conferences, students will easily be able to talk about these work samples that they chose because they are important to them.

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