Middle school student-led conferences were discussed at Northwestern Lehigh School Board March 19 meeting.

Northwestern Lehigh Middle School Principal William Devico began the discussion on the student-led conferences.

He said Katherine Kraky, one of the seventh-grade social studies and language arts teachers, who also leads the social studies department as well was part of the team that piloted the student-led conferences.

“Student led conferences take a little shift in thinking and mindsets and implementation that we’re going to talk about tonight,” he said. “I’ll talk a little bit about what went into it and I’ll talk about the pilot that Team Roar did and then I’ll get into where we are moving from here in terms of after the pilot.

“So this actually goes back to 2022 where our faculty did a read for professional development written by AMLE, (a middle level education peer review research organization) and it exposes all the different tenants of a what they believe through research and best practices middle schools should have. During that time we worked with Katie Powell, who was a professional development coordinator for them.”

He said they did several sessions through the course of the school year and talked about the different tenants of middle school’s philosophy, talked about how they are not implementing them well and changes that need to be made at the middle school level to make sure that they are meeting those standards.

“Part of that process was to do a survey with our faculty and through that survey they identified two deficiencies in our program not so much that we weren’t doing them well, it’s just that they weren’t part of our program and many of the other tenants based on our survey came back very positive that we were implementing their middle school model in a way that was meaningful and was in practice in our school,” Devico said. “So through that survey we identified two deficiencies and one of those is advisory programs, we just don’t do the advisory program currently in middle school and the other one is student-led conferences.”

He said part of the middle school professional development they did was personalized professional development where the teachers got to select a topic of interest and during the time of the 2022- 2023 school year, Katherine and her team decided that they were going to research student-led conferences and what that would mean for implementation potentially at the middle school.

Devico said they spent almost a year just researching, studying, thinking about how it might be implemented by reaching out to schools in the area that do student-led conferences and gathered what they’re doing and how they’re doing it, what’s going well in their schools, what’s not and then this year during the 2024-2025 school year Team Roar implemented student-led conferences with their students.

“Team Roar did more than 70 plus conferences where students led the process of developing what their conference would look like and then ultimately presenting to their parents their progress up to that point in the school year and they continue to do homework assignments where they’re going home to report back more on what their goals were and some of the work that they’re doing in the classrooms,” Devico explained.

Kraky described a little bit about what that pilot looked like and some of the feedback that her team, the parents, and students gave to the team.

“So first of all I want to start by just saying that this truly was a pilot our team learned a lot throughout the process and I think that moving forward there would be a number of different things that we would change but we were generally happy with how things went,” she stated.

“The reason I really love student-led conferences is because it helps us to focus on a lot of the skills that we have noticed that our students might be a little bit lacking in, things like self-advocacy, accountability in some certain areas, communicating with all different types of people, their parents, their teachers, their peers and so having these student-led conferences helps us to do that” she said. “We also found through the process that it was a really great way for us to focus on our portrait of a graduate skills, our pride values at the middle school and then also our team values as well. So in terms of that it was a really great thing for us.”

She said a student led conference is a conference where the student takes the lead presenting their work, guiding discussion about progress and grades with their parents and teachers and the teacher serves as the facilitator.

“They were not going in their blind; we are there to help them but they are truly taking on the ownership of their learning,” Kraky said.

She then explained the road map that they started with and what they were using over the course of this school year.

Kraky said before conferences they worked with the students on creating their presentations, working on what their goals were and in some way shape or form helping them to figure out how they were going to present it.

“We did give them a lot of freedom in terms of how they decided to present it some students created slides that they used to present to their parents, we had an agenda checklist, some students just decided that they were going to use that checklist that they would use to guide their discussion and maybe make some notes on it for themselves, we had a template that students could kind of fill in based on what that checklist was they could fill in some of the important information that they would need to remember so we did leave it up to them in terms of those types of decisions since it was student-led,” Kraky said.

“During all this going on staff monitored the conferences, helped to facilitate, we were available to answer questions that parents or their support system members had, that included a learning support professional, Mr. Devico was there, a guidance counselor was there. There was not a shortage of adults available to answer the questions that needed to be answered and just kind of help students facilitate their conference even though they were the ones leading it,” Kraky stated.

After Kraky and Devico further explained the process through a slide presentation and answered questions from the board, Devico said that based on the success of the pilot, their plan is to adopt student-led conferences across all grade levels at the middle school.