Slowly Crack Open Conference Access for Multilingual Families

Conferences. It’s one of the many things that all schools do, but all schools do differently. It is also a key moment in the school year for many things: collaborating on student academic effort, achievement, and behavior; creating trust between school and home; clarifying questions for the family; notifying caregivers if a student needs significant support and of what their student does well so they can receive affirmation at home.

In the spring, risk of retention decisions are often shared.

Conferences are big.

The other thing about conferences, is that like it or not, it is when many of us start to solidify assessments about a students’ support system at home, and it is when as humans, we are really vulnerable to the confirmation bias: looking for information that confirms a belief or a opinion we already hold.

This is particularly detrimental to the multilingual students and families we care for. If they don’t have equitable access to conferences, if they don’t sign up or attend in comparable numbers, it can lead some to solidify false beliefs: they don’t care about their child’s education, or they aren’t involved parents or I’m trying so hard, and they aren’t. In actuality, this is usually the farthest thing from the truth, but a staff member who hasn’t been in communication with a parent all year is unfortunately not unlikely to fall into this pit.
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It is a very very important time of year for our communication equity systems to work well, because it can shape opinions and beliefs of people in our school about our families, and therefore students, and therefore how they treat students and their expectations for them.

Tip of the Week

Measure multilingual parent-teacher conference attendance this season so you can not only know your rate of success, but you can show administration if there is a discrepancy between multilingual conference attendance and English-speaking conference attendance as a measure of the need for greater communication equity efforts.

The Story

Conference time was always a pain point for me in my role as Manager of ELL. It was plain to me every fall and spring that our conference system was failing students and families. Every cycle it was the same: I would roll out whatever system or set of expectations I had for granting conference access to multilingual families, and in the end, it would always end up the same way: chasing down teachers and administrators for the status of multilingual conferences so I could make sure an interpreter was present, not getting many responses, and in the end being unable to accept the possibility that our multilingual families wouldn’t have the opportunity to attend conferences, I would call them personally to schedule their conferences.

Doing it this way was a problem for many reasons, including: lack of sustainability for me, lack of connection between classroom teachers and multilingual families, a lack of ownership over multilingual relationships outside the ELL department, inequitable access to this critical programming, it was hard for me to keep up with how each school did their conference sign-up. At one point in time, our schools switched to scheduling systems that meant I didn’t have visibility into their conference schedules anymore so I literally could not schedule families to attend conferences, because I didn’t know what time slots were free for which teachers.

It was a nightmare, and every cycle I tried a new strategy to fix it, and to be honest, I saw almost no change. It always ended the same.

It was also conferences that filled me with enough stubborn will and determination to finally crack the nut of communication equity at our district. One school had the expectation that each teacher would call each family assigned to them, to schedule their conference, and they tracked their attempts to call on a public tracker. I was checking this tracker, because I had not received an interpreter requests, and yet again, this was one strategy for chasing after the information I needed. In the course of checking for scheduled conference times, I noticed that more than on person had logged an attempt to call every single family on their assigned caseload except for the multilingual families … even though they had been trained on our telephonic interpreter service.

Obviously, I had feelings about this. But what bothered me just as much is that it seemed that I was the only person noticing this, even though the admin team had presumably created this tracker for transparency and accountability purposes. The problem was, I was literally the only person looking at that tracker through the lens of multilingual equity.

That was the moment I explicitly told myself, “This will not happen again. Next year will be different.”
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… and it was. There are many things I changed, most of which were system-wide changes and not just related to parent-teacher conferences. But it sure made parent-teacher conferences run more smoothly and more equitably for parents.

Call to Action

1. If you already have a way to measure conference participation, great! Use that. If not, scrape together whatever you can to keep track of how many multilingual families schedule a conference, even if you create a manual tracker for yourself or your team.
2. Track categories: “scheduled conference” “attended with interpreter” and “attended without interpreter". (Hopefully there will be 0 in that last category, but you want to track it in case you need to quantify the urgency of the school collaborating with you on this issue.)
3. After conferences, ask school admin for their metrics on parent-teacher conference attendance. How many people signed up? How many people attended? What percentage of their population is this? If they have these numbers, you are off to the races. If they do not, you can either ask for an estimate or you can just share that you are tracking numbers, and would like to work together in the spring semester so you can keep tabs on equity of access to conferences. No matter their response, even if it is not the one you hoped for, use this as a starting point for a conversation about equity of access and equity in communication systems.

Better Together

So many leaders know that their multilingual families aren't getting equitable access to information, programming, or people in their schools. But most get stuck when trying to fix it because they are over-tasked and under-staffed.

Anne Truran helps educational leaders in multilingual communities set up communication equity systems and practices so families can get what they need, feel a sense of community, and school staff can feel proud not only of what they do, but how they do it.

To get support from Anne:
1) Schedule a free consultation.
2) Tell me about your school and community.
3) Get your plan for creating a better experience for multilingual families, and better results for kids.