Parent-teacher conference
Encyclopedia
A parent-teacher conference is a short meeting or conference between the parents and teachers of students to discuss children's progress at school and ways for improvement. Parent-teacher conferences supplement the information conveyed by report card
s by focusing on students' specific strengths and weaknesses in individual subjects and generalizing the level of inter-curricular skills and competences.
In case of electronic parent-teacher conferences, neither parents nor teachers need to be at school or other common location and can participate in the meeting from home or while working or traveling. The school does not need to reserve rooms for the meetings and there is more flexibility in finding suitable time. The disadvantages of electronic are a lack of face time that many participants are used to and a need for the availability to unfailing technology.
, the meetings are known as parent-teacher interview
s or parents' nights. The exact practice varies by state and by school type. Some states mandate that the interviews be conducted, others do not. Government and non-government schools also follow different federal educational laws.
Some schools have only one round of interviews per year, others have more. Two rounds is common, with terms 1 (Feb-April) and 3 (July–September) being popular times. Many schools offer multiple dates, splitting interviews either by class or by name (e.g. a-k/l-z).
, the meetings are known as parent-teacher interview
s ...
Parent-teacher interviews are mandatory for all Ontario (Canada) elementary and secondary school
teachers. Parents have the right to be allotted time for this purpose under the Ministry of Education.
, the meeting is known as parent-teacher conference' or .
In the United States, many elementary schools will shorten the school day by 2–3 hours (often for an entire week) in mid fall to allow extra time for teachers to give these conferences.
The difference between parent-teacher conferences and a PTA
meetings is that the former focus on students' academic progress while the latter organize more extra-curricular activities.
Some counties in US have proposed to consider it a legal violation for parents or guardians who fail to attend at least one parent-teacher conference during the school year.
where events need to be scheduled in a certain order, often because the output of one event forms an input for another.
In most cases, certain dependencies exist: parents prefer not to wait too long between different interviews but need long enough breaks to move from one location to another or locations in close proximity.
In the simplest case, the meetings are not pre-scheduled at all, parents come to school and line up to see each teacher they want to see. Meetings happed on first-come
basis.
Meetings can be scheduled in person, by phone or on-line.
In person scheduling comes in two flavors:
The advantage of the first is that teachers need not be involved in scheduling, the disadvantages are that a special middleman is required. The method is centralized in the sense that it is directed by neither a parent nor a teacher.
The advantage of the second is that parents need not be involved in scheduling, the disadvantages are that teachers need to do the scheduling after their classes are over or during break times that they would otherwise need for rest, prepare for classes or advising students, parents do not know which slots the teachers have available and often get times that aren't suitable or optimal (booking schedules are optimized from the point of view of the teacher, not the parent.), if a student doesn't want his/her parent to see teachers, all he/she may just not make the bookings, or leave it so late that there are no times available.
Scheduling by phone also involves a parent and a school administrator to do the scheduling without parents needing to be physically at school at the time of the scheduling. In principle, the middlemen could be avoided by automated scheduling by phone but is currently hindered by the lack of sophisticated speech analysis.
On-line scheduling is done by internet using appointment scheduling software
. The advantages of the system are that it is automated without a need for a middleman, centrally optimized both for parents and for teachers and no students involved.
A well-designed on-line booking will as a minimum be secure, easy to use and easy to manage. Features offered by more advanced systems include:Flexible schedules for interviews. Schools often required interviews over multiple days, based on year/grade, boarder/day students or other factors. There may even be a need for different length interviews for different grades/classes/days.
Regular space time slots for teachers that allow meetings to get back on schedule if required.
Spacer time slots or an optional 'gaps' setting that allow parents to prevent back-to-back bookings, thus helping on-time-running of interviews (parents have time to get to the next interview on time).
Missed bookings where a parent can indicate to the school that he/she wanted to see a certain teacher but couldn't, either because the teacher was fully booked or none of the remaining available times was suitable. This allows the school to capture this information to help better manage subsequent interview events, and to contact parents where necessary.
Statistical analysis of bookings after interviews have completed.
Optimization of the booking process during the booking period
Centrally scheduled (batch scheduled) booking systems that shift control of the booking process away from parents and back to the school and use a priority-based, multi-phase process. Parents place booking requests on-line for the teachers they want to see (in order of their priority), together with their time availability. The school / software then schedules all requests as a whole. This results in parents getting to see their top priority teachers, but potentially missing out on 'lower-priority' bookings. This is trade-of is in contrast to first-in-first-served on-line bookings, where early booking parents get the bookings they need and those bookings are 'locked-in'. Once the overall batch produced interview schedule is published by the school -- i.e. the school must relay this information securely to all parents, telling them which interviews they did and didn't get. Parents may then go on-line for a second round of bookings to make changes or (new) late bookings, or to try to book those low-priority teachers they missed out on in the first round.
Centrally scheduled systems also claim to improve the issue of core subject teachers being always over booked, as a parent priority system means these teachers are only booked out by 'high level' parent priority requests, but the end result can be overly complex for both schools to manage, and for parents who first have to prioritize one teacher over another (when they are all 'important') and then go through multiple phases of bookings and communication with the school.
problem and in the same complexity class
with other problems that involve
constraint satisfaction
and combinatorial optimization
(so no fast algorithms are known for solving it).
This can be seen as follows. We can check in time polynomial to the input size whether certain time slot assignment satisfies parent-teacher conference scheduling (PTCS) constraints. Therefore, PTCS ∈ NP. Ignoring constraints that complicate scheduling even further, let's only consider the constraints on parent availability (e.g. assuming that all teachers, rooms and time slots are always available). Then there exists a simple polynomial transformation of the class-teacher assignment problem with teacher availability constraints (CTTA) in school timetable construction to the PTCS problem: namely, map class instances to teacher instances, teacher instances to parent instances, time slots to time slots (identity map), and teacher availability to parent availability. So if the PTCS problem were polynomial-time solvable by some algorithm, the transformation described above and the algorithm could be used to solve the CTTA problem too and the CTTA task would be polynomially solvable as well. But CTTA has been earlier proved to be NP-complete by the reduction from the NP-complete 3-SAT problem , so the PTC scheduling problem cannot be polynomially solvable either, and has to be NP-complete.
techniques apply.
and inefficiency because the meetings are attended mostly by the parents of more privileged children, while the parents of the children who are more likely to need extra assistance do not attend.
Report card
A report card communicates a student's performance. In most places, the report card is issued by the school to the student or the student's parents twice or four times yearly. A typical report card uses a grading scale to determine the quality of a student's school work...
s by focusing on students' specific strengths and weaknesses in individual subjects and generalizing the level of inter-curricular skills and competences.
Types
Parent-teacher conferences exist in a variety of different forms, depending on a country, school district and individual school. The subtypes are characterized by the following attributes.Mode
Like most other meetings, parent-teacher conferences can take the form of face-to-face meetings in which parents and teachers meet in person, or electronic meetings that are conducted over the phone or via video conferencing systems like Skype or Google Voice. Face-to-face meetings offer personal contact but require that parents and teachers meet at physically the same place during the meeting.In case of electronic parent-teacher conferences, neither parents nor teachers need to be at school or other common location and can participate in the meeting from home or while working or traveling. The school does not need to reserve rooms for the meetings and there is more flexibility in finding suitable time. The disadvantages of electronic are a lack of face time that many participants are used to and a need for the availability to unfailing technology.
Participants
Parent-teacher conferences can be- one-on-one meetings between a parent and a teacher. This type is used when different subjects are taught by different teachers and parents meet the teachers for all different subjects individually. The type offers most confidentiality and allows the discussion of information specific to a student in a particular subject. The downside of the type is that the meetings are hard to schedule because they require multiple time slots and meeting places.
- many-to-one meeting is a meeting between multiple parents and one teacher. Usually the students whose parents attend the meeting are in the same class/year and the teacher is either the teacher of a particular subject or the assigned class teacher. This type is common in elementary schools. It is relatively easy to schedule but lacks privacy for discussing the progress of particular students.
- one-to-many meeting between one parent and multiple teachers. This type can be used if a child has problems in multiple subjects or when a parent comes to school outside the regularly scheduled parent-teacher conference time to meet several teachers at once.
- many-to-many meetings between multiple parents and multiple teachers. This type of meeting is easy to can be used for electing board members or disseminating general information about school, calendar of events, changes in common regulations, etc. It is inefficient for discussing issues that are specific of particular students and lacks needed privacy.
Frequency
Parent-teacher conferences usually take place once every school term, although some schools organize only one meeting during (mostly at the beginning of) the school year.Duration
The duration of parent-teacher conferences depends on the frequency of conferences and the number of participating parents and teachers. Annual meetings with multiple participants may last two hours or longer; one-to-many and many-to-one meetings once a term may last for an hour; one-on-one meetings once a year may last 15 minutes, one-on-one meetings once a term tend to last 5-10 minutes.Location
Most face-to-face meetings take place at school. One-to-many meetings may take place in separate meeting rooms, many-to-one meetings in larger classrooms and one-to-one and many-to-one meetings in the school hall, aula or auditorium, with many one-to-one meetings happening simultaneously in different parts of the room.Australia
In Australian educational systemEducation in Australia
Education in Australia is primarily the responsibility of the states and territories. Each state or territory government provides funding and regulates the public and private schools within its governing area. The federal government helps fund the public universities, but is not involved in setting...
, the meetings are known as parent-teacher interview
Parent-teacher interview
A parent-teacher interview is a once per term, short conference between students' parents and teachers. The interview is a chance for parents to meet their child's teachers and review any issues or concerns the parents or teachers may have with child/student's performance...
s or parents' nights. The exact practice varies by state and by school type. Some states mandate that the interviews be conducted, others do not. Government and non-government schools also follow different federal educational laws.
Some schools have only one round of interviews per year, others have more. Two rounds is common, with terms 1 (Feb-April) and 3 (July–September) being popular times. Many schools offer multiple dates, splitting interviews either by class or by name (e.g. a-k/l-z).
Canada
In Canadian educational systemEducation in Canada
Education in Canada is for the most part provided publicly, funded and overseen by federal, provincial, and local governments. Education is within provincial jurisdiction and the curriculum is overseen by the province. Education in Canada is generally divided into primary education, followed by...
, the meetings are known as parent-teacher interview
Parent-teacher interview
A parent-teacher interview is a once per term, short conference between students' parents and teachers. The interview is a chance for parents to meet their child's teachers and review any issues or concerns the parents or teachers may have with child/student's performance...
s ...
Parent-teacher interviews are mandatory for all Ontario (Canada) elementary and secondary school
Secondary school
Secondary school is a term used to describe an educational institution where the final stage of schooling, known as secondary education and usually compulsory up to a specified age, takes place...
teachers. Parents have the right to be allotted time for this purpose under the Ministry of Education.
United States
In US educational systemEducation in the United States
Education in the United States is mainly provided by the public sector, with control and funding coming from three levels: federal, state, and local. Child education is compulsory.Public education is universally available...
, the meeting is known as parent-teacher conference' or .
In the United States, many elementary schools will shorten the school day by 2–3 hours (often for an entire week) in mid fall to allow extra time for teachers to give these conferences.
The difference between parent-teacher conferences and a PTA
Parent-Teacher Association
In the U.S. a parent-teacher association or Parent-Teacher-Student Association is a formal organization composed of parents, teachers and staff that is intended to facilitate parental participation in a public or private school. Most public and private K-8 schools in the U.S. have a PTA, a...
meetings is that the former focus on students' academic progress while the latter organize more extra-curricular activities.
Some counties in US have proposed to consider it a legal violation for parents or guardians who fail to attend at least one parent-teacher conference during the school year.
United Kingdom
In UK educational system, the meeting is known as parent-teacher conference or parents' evening.The task
Scheduling parent-teacher conferences involves finding a time that suits both parents and teachers with their existing time constraints and finding locations for the meetings. If all meetings would be independent without any dependencies, the planning of the meetings simplifies to unordered timetabling rather than full-scale schedulingSchedule
Schedule generally refers to:* a timetable * an airline timetable* the act of Scheduling Schedule may also refer to:* Schedule , a list of actions from a set of transactions in databases...
where events need to be scheduled in a certain order, often because the output of one event forms an input for another.
In most cases, certain dependencies exist: parents prefer not to wait too long between different interviews but need long enough breaks to move from one location to another or locations in close proximity.
Methods
Various methods exist for scheduling parent-teacher conferences.In the simplest case, the meetings are not pre-scheduled at all, parents come to school and line up to see each teacher they want to see. Meetings happed on first-come
First-come, first-served
First-come, first-served – sometimes first-in, first-served and first-come, first choice – is a service policy whereby the requests of customers or clients are attended to in the order that they arrived, without other biases or preferences. The policy can be employed when processing sales orders,...
basis.
Meetings can be scheduled in person, by phone or on-line.
In person scheduling comes in two flavors:
- Parents come to school's administrative office to schedule meetings; scheduling is done by a school administrator.
- Students schedule meeting times with teachers by carrying a booking sheet and asking teachers to allocate times that are still available. Teachers have their own booking sheet and they mark the time on both sheets. Parents usually have the option of indicating which teachers they wish to see and the preferred times.
The advantage of the first is that teachers need not be involved in scheduling, the disadvantages are that a special middleman is required. The method is centralized in the sense that it is directed by neither a parent nor a teacher.
The advantage of the second is that parents need not be involved in scheduling, the disadvantages are that teachers need to do the scheduling after their classes are over or during break times that they would otherwise need for rest, prepare for classes or advising students, parents do not know which slots the teachers have available and often get times that aren't suitable or optimal (booking schedules are optimized from the point of view of the teacher, not the parent.), if a student doesn't want his/her parent to see teachers, all he/she may just not make the bookings, or leave it so late that there are no times available.
Scheduling by phone also involves a parent and a school administrator to do the scheduling without parents needing to be physically at school at the time of the scheduling. In principle, the middlemen could be avoided by automated scheduling by phone but is currently hindered by the lack of sophisticated speech analysis.
On-line scheduling is done by internet using appointment scheduling software
Appointment scheduling software
Customer Appointment Management scheduling software allows businesses and professionals to manage scheduling appointments and bookings. This type of software is also known as appointment booking software and online booking software.- Types of Software :...
. The advantages of the system are that it is automated without a need for a middleman, centrally optimized both for parents and for teachers and no students involved.
A well-designed on-line booking will as a minimum be secure, easy to use and easy to manage. Features offered by more advanced systems include:
- Optimized bookings where the system chooses the best sequence of times to allow the parent to see the required teachers 'within an overall time-frame that is suitable to the parent
Centrally scheduled systems also claim to improve the issue of core subject teachers being always over booked, as a parent priority system means these teachers are only booked out by 'high level' parent priority requests, but the end result can be overly complex for both schools to manage, and for parents who first have to prioritize one teacher over another (when they are all 'important') and then go through multiple phases of bookings and communication with the school.
Complexity
Computationally, the scheduling problem is a NP-completeNP-complete
In computational complexity theory, the complexity class NP-complete is a class of decision problems. A decision problem L is NP-complete if it is in the set of NP problems so that any given solution to the decision problem can be verified in polynomial time, and also in the set of NP-hard...
problem and in the same complexity class
Complexity class
In computational complexity theory, a complexity class is a set of problems of related resource-based complexity. A typical complexity class has a definition of the form:...
with other problems that involve
constraint satisfaction
Constraint satisfaction problem
Constraint satisfaction problems s are mathematical problems defined as a set of objects whose state must satisfy a number of constraints or limitations. CSPs represent the entities in a problem as a homogeneous collection of finite constraints over variables, which is solved by constraint...
and combinatorial optimization
Combinatorial optimization
In applied mathematics and theoretical computer science, combinatorial optimization is a topic that consists of finding an optimal object from a finite set of objects. In many such problems, exhaustive search is not feasible...
(so no fast algorithms are known for solving it).
This can be seen as follows. We can check in time polynomial to the input size whether certain time slot assignment satisfies parent-teacher conference scheduling (PTCS) constraints. Therefore, PTCS ∈ NP. Ignoring constraints that complicate scheduling even further, let's only consider the constraints on parent availability (e.g. assuming that all teachers, rooms and time slots are always available). Then there exists a simple polynomial transformation of the class-teacher assignment problem with teacher availability constraints (CTTA) in school timetable construction to the PTCS problem: namely, map class instances to teacher instances, teacher instances to parent instances, time slots to time slots (identity map), and teacher availability to parent availability. So if the PTCS problem were polynomial-time solvable by some algorithm, the transformation described above and the algorithm could be used to solve the CTTA problem too and the CTTA task would be polynomially solvable as well. But CTTA has been earlier proved to be NP-complete by the reduction from the NP-complete 3-SAT problem , so the PTC scheduling problem cannot be polynomially solvable either, and has to be NP-complete.
Management
Optimized scheduling is advantageous only as long as the participants keep to the schedule by attending the meetings and starting and finishing on time. The latter can be achieved by a school bell or electronic voice-over message played over the school PA system, at each change of interview time (E.g. "Please move to your next interview"), avoiding to schedule very short interview times that are harder to keep running on time, scheduling empty slots at intervals to assist in bringing events back onto time if they are running over. General time managementTime management
Time management is the act or process of exercising conscious control over the amount of time spent on specific activities, especially to increase efficiency or productivity. Time management may be aided by a range of skills, tools, and techniques used to manage time when accomplishing specific...
techniques apply.
Discussion
Parent-teacher conferences have been criticized for their class biasClassism
Classism is prejudice or discrimination on the basis of social class. It includes individual attitudes and behaviors, systems of policies and practices that are set up to benefit the upper classes at the expense of the lower classes...
and inefficiency because the meetings are attended mostly by the parents of more privileged children, while the parents of the children who are more likely to need extra assistance do not attend.
See also
- Educational assessment
- Personal development planningPersonal development planningPersonal development planning is the process of creating an action plan based on awareness, values, reflection, goal-setting and planning for personal development within the context of a career, education, relationship or for self-improvement....
- Parent Teacher OrganizationParent Teacher OrganizationA Parent Teacher Organization is a formal organization that consists of parents, teachers and school staff. The organization's goals may vary from organization to organization, but essentially the goals include volunteerism of parents, encouragement of teachers and students, community...