Virtual Parent Teacher Conference: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

In schools across the world, virtual parent-teacher conferences are being held in order to maintain commonplace school practices of parents talking with teachers about the academic and behavioral performance of their children.

Here is a rundown of one parent-teacher conference that I, a middle school counselor, designed and implemented with my admin team for my school.

GOOGLE FORMS

So, round one of conferences used Google forms to collect data of parent participants. The data included in the form was:

• Parent first and last name (write in selection)

• Their child's (our student) first and last name (write in selection)

• Grade level class (multiple choice selection)

• Desired time slot (drop down menu)

Pretty clear right? Short and sweet right? Whew...well not quite.

With Google being my school’s online platform, using Google Forms controlled the parent emails used to not only sign up for the form but to subsequently receive the zoom link for the parent-teacher conference. HOWEVER, Google forms was an inefficient data collection tool specifically for booking individual appointments.

Once parents signed up for their desired time, that specific time slot never. went. away.

Example scenario, Teacher Smith’s parent-teacher conference form was released to parents. After receiving the form link in their email, several parents immediately filled out and submitted their forms. About an hour into its release, Teacher Smith checked their form. Shock! Three parents booked the same time slot for 9:34am to 9:41am. How could this be?

With Google forms' drop down menu feature, it’s sort of built like a survey. So, when parents select a time slot on the Google form’s drop down menu, the time doesn’t go away. Instead, it needs to be manually deleted in order for that time to not appear when other parents fill out the form and thus prevent duplicates.

I am the only school counselor in a mid-size school from grades 5 through 8. Therefore, take the Teacher Smith scenario and instead of checking the form after one hour, the form was checked after two days! Yikes! In this manner with my situation, rather than one Teacher Smith it was fifteen! And to get even more ugly, imagine having upwards of five parents booking one time slot for a teacher. I’m not done y’all. These duplicates stained many of my colleagues’ Google forms.

Let me take a quick water break...

Only having time for a two-minute mini meltdown, I regained control of my breathing, brainstormed with my principal and assistant principal and we arrived at a resolution. First and foremost, we didn’t say a word to teachers as most of them were (and are) dealing with daily stress with teaching online. We also had three days until the parent-teacher conference day (PTC), so we had time to clean up this Google forms mess.

Again, as I stated above, I was the primary coordinator of the PTC and I needed to take action. I went into each middle school teacher’s Google form, downloaded their responses to a Google sheets page (Google’s version of Microsoft excel), and highlighted all their duplicates. Next, I removed the highlight from the first parent that chose a time slot that was a duplicate - first come, first serve pretty much. Then, I proceeded to call each parent that chose an already filled time slot. The abbreviated line I used to ensure the school’s integrity (and mine) were still intact was “the system we used did not refresh immediately after each parent. Therefore, I just wanted to call you personally to help you choose another time slot.”

Luckily, another teacher assisted me with calling parents, too. Small wins were made as the highlighted names dwindled. These small wins were so gratifying especially when several parents had to sign up all over again because they had three or four duplicates across the forms they signed up for. Now, those parents were the MVPs!

Another water break for reliving this stressful event.

From the chaotic two days of shifting most of my focus from my kiddos to these spreadsheets, the hard work paid off on event day!

Teachers had a smooth time sticking to their schedules from the parent sign up sheets. Parents received their zoom links to talk with their child’s teachers. And myself along with the rest of the admin team could focus on our own zoom conferences with parents. There were still a few hiccups with a couple double bookings that fell beneath the cracks, yet they were quickly resolved with a brief 3 minute accommodation a teacher had in between meetings.

Needless to say, please treat Google forms’ drop down menu feature as a survey rather than an individual, booked time slot. That is unless you plan on checking your form every 5 minutes to ensure there are no double/triple/quadruple bookings.

Google forms for individual sign ups is a no for me dawg.

Mide

Miss InterEducation