With the school year now in full swing, one of the first significant milestones that sets the tone for the months ahead is the parent-teacher conference. These conversations are opportunities to build trust, align expectations, and strengthen the partnership between families, teachers, and students.
At their best, they’re energizing: students feel proud, families feel informed and connected, and teachers feel supported. At their worst, they can leave everyone frustrated, with families feeling like they’re being spoken to and not with, and students feeling like they’re being spoken about but not actually being included.
This is where school leaders can play a crucial role.
Encouraging teachers to move to student-led parent-teacher conferences is one of the most impactful ways to elevate these important touchpoints. When done well, they increase family engagement, positioning them as collaborators, decision-makers, and co-creators, which we know from research and experience is a crucial driver of student success. Most important, this approach gives students a sense of agency, allowing them to participate with greater confidence in their learning.
Centering Student Voice, Engaging Families
When students lead—sharing their learning, reflecting on their own academic growth, and setting goals, all with the guidance of their teachers—it exponentially increases impact.
Importantly, student-led parent-teacher conferences include every aspect of what The Leadership Academy believes are the essential components of a rich student experience.
- Academic Success & Deep Learning: Students can share their data and progress, building both excitement and agency.
- Strong Relationships: Students can engage in dialogue with their teachers and parents, fostering collaboration.
- Empowered Problem-Solving: By naming challenges and proposing solutions, students can build confidence.
- Confident Communication: Students can gain practice articulating their academic and personal goals.
The student-led model can be wildly successful. But if poorly implemented, it can also have the reverse effect.
Three Ways School Leaders Can Support Teachers in Student-Led Conferences
Before beginning a recent professional learning session with a school leadership team, the principal casually recounted a conversation she’d had the evening before with a friend. In it, the friend quite colorfully described his child’s parent-teacher conference as “the pits.’
The child had been asked—on the spot and with no preparation—to lead the conference. The boy froze. As his teacher filled the silence with reflective questions that the son never anticipated, his parents felt like silent bystanders who weren’t a part of the conversation at all. Instead of feeling empowered, the process undermined their child’s confidence and left him feeling embarrassed.
The story sparked robust conversation, resulting in us diverting a portion of that day’s planned learning to a different topic: ensuring that every student and family feels supported in their conferences. We landed on three actions leadership teams can take to make that a reality.
One: Prepare the teachers to prepare the students
Reinforce that student voice belongs at the center of these conversations and help teachers scaffold student leadership by providing tools, practice, and feedback. The goal is for every student to know what to expect and feel set up for success.
Leaders can also build time into staff meetings or PLCs for teachers to rehearse and role-play student-led conference structures. Provide sample agendas or protocols so that teachers don’t have to start from scratch.
Two: Cut the “Eduspeak”
Help teachers translate assessment results into language families can understand. Benchmark graphs that are filled with terms like criterion-referenced or norm-referenced are technically accurate, but parents shouldn’t need to spend valuable time in an already too short meeting trying to decode jargon.
Instead, principals should model parent-friendly visuals and explanations. A fall benchmark, for example, should be framed as a baseline and a tool to highlight strengths and areas for growth.
Provide sample scripts or sentence starters such as:
- This line shows where we hope students are by the end of the year. Let’s talk about where your child is right now….
- These results show that your child shines when….
- Here’s an area we’ll focus on developing next….
- In class, that looks like….
- One way you could support at home is….
The goal is to help teachers demystify the data and keep the focus on what matters most: the student’s learning journey.
Three: End with “So What, Now What?”
Encourage teachers to close the conference with clear direction in the form of a “so what, now what” moment. Provide the teachers with templates or sample closing prompts so that parents leave with more than just information—they leave with an idea of what comes next.
Guide teachers to share next steps for themselves and the student, and to offer parents simple ways to support learning at home. Reinforce that support doesn’t require hours of homework help, but consistent check-ins using questions like:
- What did you learn today?
- What challenged you?
- What are you still curious about?
- What do you need from me, or from your teacher, to keep growing?
The goal is to end conferences on a note of clarity and partnership.
Student-Led Conferences as Catalysts
Parent-teacher conferences are too important to be left to chance. They shape how parents view their child’s school experience and how students see themselves as learners. They shape school culture and trust. And they’re powerful opportunities for student growth.
When principals take the lead by giving teachers the tools, language, and structures they need, they transform these conferences from routine calendar events into catalysts for deeper student and family connection. In doing so, they affirm students as capable learners and strengthen the partnership between families and schools—turning every conversation into momentum for student success.
Anthony King, Ed.L.D. is the Executive Director of External Engagement at The Leadership Academy, an organization that provides professional learning and coaching to K-12 education leaders nationwide, with a goal of transforming schools and accelerating learning for all students. A former school principal and district leader, he started his career as a third-grade teacher.