How to have a successful parent-teacher conference

Parent-teacher conferences can seem like high-pressure events. 

There are only 10 or 15 minutes, at most, for you and the teacher to discuss many important things. Plus you want to keep things positive and the teacher engaged. It’s a lot to consider.

On this episode of Parenting Behavior, host Dr. Andy Kahn will talk about some things you can do to make the conference as successful as possible. 

We’d love to hear from you. You can email us at ParentingBehavior@understood.org.

Timestamps

(0:54) Basic ways to prepare before the conference

(2:29) Advance communication

(4:44) How to prepare emotionally

(8:16) Special considerations for neurodivergent kids

Related resources

• 3 ways I engage my child in parent-teacher conferences 

• Teachers weigh in: What I wish parents asked at parent-teacher conferences

• Listen: How to make the most of parent-teacher conferences  

• Download: Parent-teacher conference worksheet

Episode transcript

Andy: Parent-teacher conferences. Man, they seem like high-pressure events. You have only a short period of time, 10 or 15 minutes tops, and can be really hard to get in all those important things, you want to talk about. The concerns you want to bring out, have to have a positive slant trying to keep the teacher engaged at the right level. So, with some planning ahead of time, we can make this event so much more manageable and successful. 

This is "Parenting Behavior" and I'm your host, Dr. Andy Kahn. I'm a parent and licensed psychologist with over 20 years experience helping families manage challenging behavior. Today we're going to talk about having successful parent-teacher conferences. 

(0:54) Basic ways to prepare before the conference

Let's start with some practical basics, things you can do in advance of this conference. First and foremost, take some time to look at your child's grades and some work samples. 

When you look at the work samples, we're going to look for things like are they rushing through it? Are they engaging in stuff that looks like a low effort? Take a look at how they behave while they're doing their schoolwork. Do you see them engaging in avoidance? Are they complaining and trying to get out of doing the activity, or are they looking frustrated on a regular basis? 

When you look at the actual work on the page, is it messy? Are you seeing low effort? Big areas of gaps? Areas where they tend to get up and want to walk around and get away from the work? Keep in mind, these struggles are things that you really have to pay attention to see but can be really helpful for the conference preparation. 

Let's talk about some more of the practical basics here. First, think about technology. What do you do to prepare yourself for the meeting? If you're doing this meeting remotely, thinking about the logistics, where are you going to be doing this meeting? What are you going to be using? Are you going on your phone versus a tablet or your computer? 

If you're doing the conference at home via video, everybody knows that when you use Zoom for a meeting and you're running late, it's going to decide to update just at that moment in time. So, see if you can run it in advance and get those updates out of the way. Test out your internet speed, make sure it's adequate. If you got to reset a router or reset the cable modem, these things can be really helpful to do in advance. 

Finally, establish a space where you're going to do this meeting with your teacher. Keep in mind that sometimes it's hard to find a quiet space. If you need to send your kids out to play and get some space, by all means, plan to do that. 

(2:29) Advance communication

So much of what we do during the conference comes from the preparation and the communication that we use. If you're thinking about how to prepare for the meeting just from your own perspective, that can be hard enough. But keep in mind, if you have a parenting partner, having conversations in advance of this meeting is really important. If you don't agree on some topic or you live separately from who is parenting your child, you may find having discussions in advance is going to be really important. 

And then you set your priorities. What is it we're really going to be talking about during this meeting? Whether or not you're in a relationship with a child's parent or you're co-parenting separately, it's so important to make sure that you at least have that conversation in advance. Try to align as best as you can on what you think is important. And if you need to have the battle, have it off-camera. 

In addition to communication with your parenting partners if you have them, is communication in advance with the teacher. Sometimes having the opportunity to set out an agenda in advance can be really helpful. Or even a brief list of the things you want to talk about. Also be practical. There are time constraints for these meetings. Teachers have a very limited period of time to chat with you. So, the teacher also is going to have things they want to share. So, keep that in mind in keeping your list sort of focused and concise. 

The other thing that's really important is to have that communication with your child in advance of the meeting, too. Now, this doesn't matter how old your child is, you'll just do it slightly differently. For older kids, it's really important to say, "OK, are there any things that you want me to share with your teacher that are important, that are going on in school? There's the other one that's a little spicier, which is is there anything I'm going to hear from your teacher right now that may surprise me, or be things that we need to pay attention to? 

Giving your child a safe space to talk about "OK. Yeah, I messed up, or I had a problem with a peer." Whatever it is, if your child feels safe and they're not going to get in big trouble for it, that's going to be a way better time to talk about it rather than being surprised by the teacher. 

If we think about younger kids and they may not understand a lot about the meeting process, just share with the child "You know what? I'm going to talk to your teacher about how things are going for you, and they're going to share the good things and how things are going. And if things are challenging or things are tough for you, we're going to try to figure out how to make it better, easier for you."

This is real important before the meeting so that things aren't surprising so your kids don't think it's something mysterious or secret. 

(4:44) How to prepare emotionally

Let's talk about another important component here: Preparing yourself emotionally for the meeting. Listen, I've been in hundreds of IEP meetings and parent-teacher conferences, and I've seen every imaginable parent response. As a parent, what could happen? You could feel tearful. You could get angry. You could want to step out and walk away. I've even had parents blow a raspberry in my face when they were upset, so I'm not surprised by anything I say. 

But for parents, when I coached them to go to these meetings, we talk about trying to imagine what could happen in advance. What would happen if you heard something that really upset you or something that was super nice? You know, we can get tearful when we get really wonderful things shared about our kids. Taking some time to prepare, do some deep breathing, relax, and get yourself into a calm place can really help you navigate the meeting. 

If something's going wrong and you're not feeling great in the moment, just share with the teacher "I'm having really big emotions about this at the moment. Maybe I need to take a minute." Taking a minute to calm down, as opposed to going off the rails for 15 minutes, it's completely OK. Do the best you can and try to prepare wherever you can. 

Setting your child up for success in how you do the meeting is also really important. Don't be afraid to ask the teacher questions specifically about, you know, when can we follow up and talk about some of this content again? And give them a window of time to let them know that, yeah, you're going to be coming back to talk about these things. 

In addition, create the best strategies. Ask the teacher, "Hey, is it best if I reach out to you by phone? Or do you prefer email?" And the secret to good emails with teachers is to make sure you keep them short. There's nothing like getting these five and six-paragraph emails. Pretty well guaranteed the teacher is going to see that at the end of a long day and go, "Oh, let me look at this tomorrow." But if you ask something really brief, you might get a reply right away. So, be mindful of their time in terms of how you communicate. 

The other thing that's really helpful is to ask the teacher, you know, "How are you hoping to address some of these concerns? Other things that you're thinking that you'll do or things that you're planning to do?" Give the teacher a little bit of grace. They may have had seven other parent-teacher conferences that day. 

If they look like they're struggling or they're trying to come up with something on the fly, give them permission to take some time and say, "Hey, I don't need you to solve this or even think about a strategy today, but do you mind if I reach out to you in a couple of days, and maybe we can strategize or see what kind of ideas you have?" This will make teachers feel a lot better about that interaction and problem-solving. 

Asking your teacher how you might support them in their work is a really important strategy. Keeping in mind that there are things you may know about your child that can be really helpful. In addition, you can actually be helpful sometimes by deciding what you're not going to do. So, for example, if your child brings home some math homework and they're really struggling, keep in mind you may not know how they were instructed what your child was being taught in the classroom. So, wrestling over that after school may be a really bad idea. 

So, giving permission to say, "Hey, I'm going to back away from this homework. I'm going to send a note back to the teacher, maybe really appreciate it because sometimes we can screw up what they're doing in their math or in some of their topics." So, just keep that in mind. There are things we can do to help. Sometimes there's things that we can agree not to do that's equally helpful. 

After the conference, it's really important to take some time for yourself to do some calming. You may have learned something that upsets you or feel really frustrated about something the teacher said. So, it's an important time not to just go fire off an email or go berate your child for something they've done. You're going to have calmer and better conversations and communications if you just take a little bit of time and calm down after the meeting. 

(8:16) Special considerations for neurodivergent kids

Finally, let's talk about some special considerations for neurodiverse kids. Remember, kids with learning and thinking differences, they have a different approach at times to their learning, and it may be very difficult to bring these topics up for the first time. But a parent-teacher conference is a great time to seed the field, so to speak. 

Introducing differences about your child can really have a lot of impact if the teacher is not aware of it. So, keep in mind considering sharing things like how to work with my child and creating a little document. 

So, for example, in my workplace, I'm neurodivergent, and one of the things I do is I write a really brief document on the best ways to work with me, might include the fact that I like instructions being sent to me in a written format, or your child prefers to get notes in addition to verbal instructions. Little things that can give clues to the teacher on how to be successful with your child. 

In addition, sharing strategies that work for you at home in getting your child focused or helping them work better, or creating even better workspaces. There are things you may know about your child that could take weeks or months for your teacher to learn about your child. So, sharing some of those secrets is really important. Remember, you're that first expert in your child, and teachers may not pick up on that right away. 

In addition, keep in mind that any things that you recommend may not be feasible in the classroom and saying to the teacher, "You know what? Some of the things I do at home aren't practical in school. And I get that. I know that you have 20-plus kids in your space, so if these things don't work for you, don't feel bad about just not doing them. Use some other strategies. Or maybe we can chat about ways to really help make my child successful." 

Finally, understand that conferences are a great time to surface issues about learning about neurodivergence and how your child might be processing information differently. They may not have that opportunity otherwise. 

Thanks for listening to this episode of "Parenting Behavior with Dr. Andy Kahn." We'd love to hear from you if you have any thoughts on the show. You can email us at parentingbehavior@understood.org. I'll put that email in the show notes to where you can also find more resources and links to anything we mentioned. 

"Parenting Behavior with Dr. Andy Kahn is brought to you by Understood.org. It's produced and edited by Cody Nelson. Editorial guidance by Rae Jacobson. Music and mixing by Justin D. Wright. Ilana Millner is our supervising producer. Briana Berry is our production director. Neil Drumming is our editorial director. 

For Understood.org, our executive directors are Laura Key, Scott Cocchiere, and Seth Melnick. Understood is a nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering people with learning and thinking differences like ADHD and dyslexia. If you want to support us as we go through with our important mission, please consider donating. Go to Understood.org/give.