How Do I Know My Child Is Learning?

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When school began at the end of the summer, parents dropped off their children at school as they do every school year. But in the 2020-21 school year, parents find themselves feeling like outsiders separated in a way like never before from their children’s schools.

Suddenly, opportunities to walk through hallways, peruse the work on the walls, peek into classrooms, and have a spontaneous catch-up conversation with a child’s teacher at drop off or pick up are gone. As those informal touchpoints between parents and teachers disappeared with socially-distanced and COVID-safe schools, feedback about student learning and well-being has become more important than ever.

At Whitby, we understand that feedback is critical in maintaining parents’ connection to their children’s teacher, classroom, and learning. We continue to build in opportunities to touch base with parents so we can share information about their children’s academic and social-emotional development.

1. Check-in phone calls from a child’s teacher are great ways to update parents on students' social-emotional welfare. It's the perfect opportunity to address immediate concerns or questions parents may have.
2. Virtual parent-teacher conferences effectively communicate information about student learning, whether about preschool and elementary or middle and high school students. During these individual meetings, teachers share assessment data, identify strengths and challenges, and communicate progress and goals in all learning areas.

3. Ongoing feedback on student work can be communicated in a variety of ways. Checklists and rubrics, written comments on student work, and digital assessment folders and digital portfolios like Seesaw are excellent ways to keep parents connected. Using these tools, teachers can share specific feedback about students’ work and opportunities for growth. This ongoing feedback also offers an opportunity for students’ self-reflection as they review their work in the context of their learning goals.
4. Newsletters or “Ask Me Abouts” are additional ways schools can bring parents into the classrooms, sharing learning engagements and student explorations with parents. This becomes an opportunity to initiate conversations between children and parents about the learning that has been happening. These conversations prompt children to share the oral feedback they receive during classroom discussions or one-on-one conferring with their teacher and share their reflections about their learning. This is a perfect opportunity for parents to ask their children what they might do differently the next time or how they will apply this new understanding going forward.

5. Finally, report cards with a combination of standards-referenced check marks or grades plus a detailed narrative provide specific and contextualized information about a child’s learning during distance learning. This combination of reporting offers parents and students a complete picture of the learner. Report cards serve as a reference to established and standards-based curricular goals – identifying strengths and challenges for particular topics, skills, and understandings within subject areas, and assessing a student’s habits of mind and work. The narrative adds an additional dimension, reporting on a child’s process of and approach to learning.

Parents continue to play a critical role in the partnership with schools around their child’s learning, despite the social distancing restrictions on school campuses. It is vital that we cultivate this link between home and school, regularly providing feedback about student learning and social-emotional well being. At Whitby, we have found that this ongoing and purposeful feedback maintains parents’ connection to our school and their children’s learning.

If you want to learn more about the Whitby Difference and how we are reimagining teaching and learning during these COVID times, visit www.whitbyschool.org.

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