Being the Parent

Here are two of the four pages of standards.

I have a 3.5 year old and an 8-month year old and we just got back from their fall  parent-teacher conferences.  I was impressed that my son’s teacher presented me with somewhat of a learner profile and an amazing portfolio of his work.  He learns best when the teacher uses games and when activities are done outside.  He doesn’t like a ton of praise and sometimes says he can’t do things that he can because he is afraid that he won’t do them correctly and doesn’t want to disappoint.  He has a crush on an older girl named Skylar and he gets really nervous around her (I witnessed this and it was adorable). His favorite subject is math.  When given a choice of stations, he usually goes to blocks.  While I know a lot about my son, this knowledge helps me tremendously as I do see some similarities at home and many differences.  For example, his teacher states he is a leader yet really listens to others and helps them plan.  He is empathetic and worries about others.  At home it is usually his way or a tantrum.    

Each week his teacher sets a personalized goal for him and works to show progress of his goal.  Even my 8-month-old daughter has a personalized goal each week.  This week she is working on “developing a 4-point stance” so that she can crawl.  I know that this is feasible for their teachers because they are given planning time to do their goals and they have 4-12 kids in a class. It makes me wonder if we changed the traditional classroom model how we could do this for mass amounts of students at the high school level. 

I was also impressed that the center has “learning targets” and uses a beginning, progressing, and successful system to report out where students are.  I’m embarrassed to admit I’ve never seen an elementary report card but am thinking it probably looks a lot like this. 

So now that I’ve rambled about this, what does this mean?  To me it reinforces that we must communicate more to our parents.  A grade does not tell a story.   I want to know a lot about my child to help him/her develop.  All of this information helps me to know what I need to focus on at home.  It also makes me think about what type of school will be best for him, traditional learning or something like STEM.  I wish we were able to report out like this at the high school level but really wonder how possible this is what the amount of students we work with.