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What real world “difficult conversations” tell us about student evaluation
Every year, employers everywhere pay more than they need to in order to dismiss incompetent employees. Why is that? Nine times out of ten it’s because the employee’s manager did not provide the underperforming employee with formal notice of the problem. Why doesn’t the manager provide the notice? Because that would involve having a “difficult conversation” and people, whether they are managers or employees parents or teachers, avoid these types of conversations like the plague. When a student is struggling at school, a parent-teacher interview becomes a “difficult conversation”.
The easiest thing for the teacher (and the parent) to do is to pretend that there isn’t a problem and focus on some of the student’s positive behaviours and achievements. As a result, problems fester and remediation becomes increasingly difficult. Many parents who turn to SQE for help are the victims of avoided “difficult conversations” with their children’s teachers.
If a teacher is strong enough, he or she can attempt to address the student’s misbehaviour or underachievement in an interview with the parents, but how can they do that credibly if they don’t have data to back up what they’re saying? Just how often is Stacey running around the room screaming like a banshee? Just how weak are Syed’s arithmetic skills? Educators who promote narrative report cards and parent-teacher interviews over report cards with letter or percentage grades are assuming that teachers are going to be able to handle these “difficult conversations” far better than most senior managers in both the private and public sectors. And that’s just not a realistic expectation. (If you’re interested in learning more about this fascinating topic that applies to both our work and personal lives, I recommend that you read the book Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most by Patton et al.)
I have found and observed over the years, that parent and teacher interviews have never been about how to improve performance, but rather an opportunity to tell parents that it is their responsibility and fault that ‘little Suzie’ is misbehaving or getting poor grades. In the Canadian system, teachers, the schools and for that matter the ministry of education, are not held accountable or taken to task, when ‘little Suzie’ is failing. In trying to obtain services for my child, the common problem that I have found, is that there is no laws in place, requiring the educator to prove without a doubt that ‘little Suzie’ poor learning outcomes is a result of teaching methods, learning disabilities, curriculum, assessment methods, or education policies . If the educator, was truly held accountable, parent-teacher interviews would be on a fairer footing, where all factors would be considered and duly noted. I bet if educators were held accountable legally, the problem of poor literacy and numeracy would not be a problem in today’s society.