In a typical school year, our elementary fall conferences run for three days at the end of October. I sit and talk with parents and students for half an hour at a time.

This year, however, our schools started 100% online, so our district decided to have a “soft start.” The first three days in September became our “conference days.” Teachers called every family to talk them through what to expect for the beginning of school and checking that every family had computers and internet connection.

Meeting parents on those phone calls, I made brief notes about their children. “She has severe social anxiety, especially on Zoom calls.” “He likes doing his work on the computer. Online learning has suited him.” “She has ADD/ADHD, so staying focused is hard for her.” “We have two other children in the online program, and we both work full-time, so he’s going to have to work independently.”

Moving our conference days to the first three days of school meant we lost them in the last week of October. No time set aside even to Zoom with parents!

But that didn’t change the normal reminders running through my head:

• Keep parents apprised of student progress.
• Send home positive communications.
• Alert parents to any problems.
• Make sure to do all those things before parent-teacher conferences.

By a few weeks in, I was feeling so far behind. I wasn’t meeting students on a daily basis. Some students weren’t coming to any sessions at all. A handful were turning in projects for me to grade (like the math project on order of operations), but most families skipped the teacher-graded projects. Not seeing students, and not seeing student work, left me very dependent on the online system my district adopted.

I started sending home the online system’s computer-generated “progress reports.” Instead of helping, they caused more anxiety. How could students be so far behind, according to the system, parents asked, when the children were doing all their assigned work every day?

I checked and found that all the students had some assignments that were designated “not mastered.” I told parents that children needed to fix those assignments, not just move on to the next one. As students did corrections, they started to catch up. Nevertheless, as I continued sending out the “progress reports” each week, parents told me they didn’t line up with what they were seeing on their accounts.

I had to learn more. My team and I realized our “soft start” had impacted the scheduling algorithm. As far as the computer system was concerned, all our students started all their classes on September 2. That wasn’t true. Most of them started doing assignments about September 14! Supposedly, they were all two weeks overdue on their work.

We also discovered that there were more assignments in the system than there are days in the school year. We manually changed the start date for each class, and we eliminated some of the assignments.

Eventually, I found out how to access my “gradebook” in the system. (The most obvious link led to a gradebook with zero students. I checked the system’s website, which said some districts chose not to activate the gradebook; I assumed our district hadn’t activated ours. It wasn’t until later my teammates showed me another route to find it.)

As of this week—“conference week”—a few things have happened. We’ve reset the classes to show due dates that actually line up with this year’s school calendar. Students and parents have worked to make sure all the assignments are mastered, so every assignment counts as completed.

This week I contacted each family individually, not with the computer-generated “progress report,” but with a personal email. “I just checked Angelo’s gradebook. Wow! What a great job he’s doing! He’s ahead in history and nearly on schedule for everything else. So close! And his grades are all 3s. I’m impressed!”

If students needed to catch up in a subject—or needed more of a challenge, I gave suggestions for how that could most easily happen.

No conferences? Remember to communicate regularly. 

Now instead of panicking, parents are starting to relax. They can see their children are working hard, and they can see the results of that work. “That’s good to hear. He’s been working hard to improve the quality of his work and his scores.”

Me too. Every day, I’m working hard to improve the quality of my work in this brand-new environment. And I’m trying to “conference” regularly with my parents, even if I don’t get to sit down with them face-to-face.