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A parent-teacher conference is a short meeting or conference between the parents and teachers of students to discuss children's progress at school and ways for improvement. Parent-teacher conferences supplement the information conveyed by report cards by focusing on students' specific strengths and weaknesses in individual subjects and generalizing the level of inter-curricular skills and competences.

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A parent teacher conference at Bowral High School in Australia

Types

Parent-teacher conferences exist in a variety of different forms, depending on a country, school district and individual school. The subtypes are characterized by the following attributes.

Mode

Like most other meetings, parent-teacher conferences can take the form of face-to-face meetings in which parents and teachers meet in person, or electronic meetings that are conducted over the phone or via video conferencing systems like Skype or Google Voice. Face-to-face meetings offer personal contact but require that parents and teachers meet at physically the same place during the meeting.

In case of electronic parent-teacher conferences, neither parents nor teachers need to be at school or other common location and can participate in the meeting from home or while working or traveling. The school does not need to reserve rooms for the meetings and there is more flexibility in finding suitable time. The disadvantages of electronic are a lack of face time that many participants are used to and a need for the availability to unfailing technology.

Participants

Parent-teacher conferences can be

• one-on-one meetings between a parent and a teacher. This type is used when different subjects are taught by different teachers and parents meet the teachers for all different subjects individually. The type offers most confidentiality and allows the discussion of information specific to a student in a particular subject. The downside of the type is that the meetings are hard to schedule because they require multiple time slots and lmeeting places.
• many-to-one meeting is a meeting between multiple parents and one teacher. Usually the students whose parents attend the meeting are in the same class/year and the teacher is either the teacher of a particular subject or the assigned class teacher. This type is common in elementary schools. It is relatively easy to schedule but lacks privacy for discussing the progress of particular students.
• one-to-many meeting between one parent and multiple teachers. This type can be used if a child has problems in multiple subjects or when a parent comes to school outside the regularly scheduled parent-teacher conference time to meet several teachers at once.
• many-to-many meetings between multiple parents and multiple teachers. This type of meeting is easy to can be used for electing board members or disseminating general information about school, calendar of events, changes in common regulations, etc. It is inefficient for discussing issues that are specific of particular students and lacks needed privacy.

Frequency

Parent-teacher conferences usually take place once every school term, although some schools organize only one meeting during (mostly at the beginning of) the school year.

Duration

The duration of parent-teacher ocnferences depends on the frequency of conferences and the number of participatings parents and teachers. Annual meetings with multiple participants may last two hours or longer; one-to-many and many-to-one meetings once a term may last for an hour; one-on-one meetings once a year may last 15 minutes, one-on-one meetings once a term tend to last 5-10 minutes.

Location

Most face-to-face meetings take place at school. One-to-many meetings may take place in separate meeting rooms, many-to-one meetings in larger classrooms and one-to-one and many-to-one meetings in the school hall, aula or auditorium, with many one-to-one meetings happening simultaneously in different parts of the room.

Regional variations

Australia

In Australian educational system, the meetings are known as parent-teacher interviews or parents' nights. The exact practice varies by state and by school type. Some states mandate that the interviews be conducted, others do not. Governement and non-government schools also follow different federal educational laws.

Some schools have only one round of interviews per year, others have more. Two rounds is common, with terms 1 (Feb-April) and 3 (July–September) being popular times. Many schools offer multiple dates, splitting interviews either by class or by name (e.g. a-k/l-z).

Canada

In Canadian educational system, the meetings are known as parent-teacher interviews ...

Parent-teacher interviews are mandatory for all Ontario (Canada) elementary and secondary school teachers. Parents have the right to be allotted time for this purpose under the Ministry of Education.

United States

In US educational system, the meeting is known as parent-teacher conference' or .

In the United States, many elementary schools will shorten the school day by 2–3 hours (often for an entire week) in mid fall to allow extra time for teachers to give these conferences.

The difference between a parent-teacher conference and a PTA meeting is that.

Some counties have proposed to consider it a legal violation for parents or guardians who fail to attend at least one parent-teacher conference during the school year.

United Kingdom

In UK educational system, the meeting is known as parent-teacher conference or parents' evening.

Scheduling

The task

Scheduling parent-teacher conferences involves finding a time that suits both parents and teachers with their existing time constraints and finding locations for the meetings. If all meetings would be independent without any dependencies, the planning of the meetings simplifies to unordered timetabling rather than full-scale scheduling where events need to be scheduled in a certain order, often because the output of one event forms an input for another.

In most cases, certain dependencies exist: parents prefer not to wait too long between different interviews but need long enough breaks to move from one location to another or locations in close proximity.

Methods

Various methods exist for scheduling parent-teacher conferences.

In the simplest case, the meetings are not pre-scheduled at all, parents come to school and line up to see each teacher they want to see. Meetings happed on first-come basis.

Meetings can be scheduled in person, by phone or on-line. In person scheduling comes in two flavors:

1. Parents come to school's administrative office to schedule meetings; scheduling is done by a school administrator.
2. Students schedule meeting times with teachers by carrying a booking sheet and asking teachers to allocate times that are still available. Teachers have their own booking sheet and they mark the time on both sheets. Parents usually have the option of indicating which teachers they wish to see and the preferred times.

The advantage of the first is that teachers need not be involved in scheduling, the disadvantages are that a special middleman is required. The method is centralized in the sense that it is directed by neither a parent nor a teacher.

The advantage of the second is that parents need not be involved in scheduling, the disadvantages are that teachers need to do the scheduling after their classes are over or during break times that they would otherewise need for rest, prepare for classes or advising students, parents do not know which slots the teachers have available and often get times that aren't suitable or optimal (booking schedules are optimised from the point of view of the teacher, not the parent.), if a student doesn't want his/her parent to see teachers, all he/she may just not make the bookings, or leave it so late that there are no times available.

Scheduling by phone also involves a parent and a school administrator to do the scheduling without parents needing to be physically at school at the time of the scheduling. In principle, the middlemen could be avoided by automated scheduling by phone but is currently hindered by the lack of sophisticated speech analysis.

On-line scheduling is done by internet using appointment scheduling software. The advantages of the stystem are that it is automated without a need for a middleman, centrally optimized both for parents and for teachers and no students involved.

A well-designed on-line booking will as a minimum be secure, easy to use and easy to manage. Features offered by more advanced systems include:

• Optimised bookings where the system chooses the best sequence of times to allow the parent to see the required teachers 'within an overall time-frame that is suitable to the parent, rather than the parent simply choosing individual times to see teachers (although the latter method should always be available).
• Flexible schedules for interviews. Schools often required interviews over multiple days, based on year/grade, boarder/day students or other factors. There may even be a need for different length interviews for different grades/classes/days.
• Regular space time slots for teachers that allow meetings to get back on schedule if required.
• Spacer time slots or an optional 'gaps' setting that allow parents to prevent back-to-back bookings, thus helping on-time-running of interviews (parents have time to get to the next interview on time).
• Missed bookings where a parent can indicate to the school that he/she wanted to see a certain teacher but couldn't, either because the teacher was fully booked or none of the remaining available times was suitable. This allows the school to capture this information to help better manage subsequent interview events, and to contact parents where necessary.
• Statistical analysis of bookings after interviews have completed.

allo

• Optimisation of the booking process during the booking period
• Centrally scheduled (batch scheduled) booking systems that shift control of the booking process away from parents and back to the school and use a priority-based, multi-phase process. Parents place booking requests on-line for the teachers they want to see (in order of their priority), together with their time availability. The school / software then schedules all requests as a whole. This results in parents getting to see their top priority teachers, but potentially missing out on 'lower-priority' bookings. This is trade-of is in contrast to first-in-first-served on-line bookings, where early booking parents get the bookings they need and those bookings are 'locked-in'. Once the overall batch produced interview schedule is published by the school -- i.e. the school must relay this information securely to all parents, telling them which interviews they did and didn't get. Parents may then go on-line for a second round of bookings to make changes or (new) late bookings, or to try to book those low-priority teachers they missed out on in the first round.

Centrally scheduled systems also claim to improve the issue of core subject teachers being always over booked, as a parent priority system means these teachers are only booked out by 'high level' parent priority requests, but the end result can be overly complex for both schools to manage, and for parents who first have to prioritise one teacher over another (when they are all 'important') and then go through multiple phases of bookings and communication with the school.

Complexity

Computationally, the scheduling problem is a NP-complete problem and in the same complexity class with other problems that involve constraint satisfaction andcombinatorial optimization.

It has been shown that the decision variant of the timetable construction problem is NP-complete, so no fast algorithms exist for solving it.

This can be seen as follows. We can check in time polynomial to the input size whether certain time slot assignment satisfies parent-teacher conference scheduling (PTCS) constraints. Therefore, PTCS ∈ NP. Ignoring constraints that complicate scheduling even further, let's only consider the constraints on parent availability (e.g. assuming that all teachers, rooms and time slots are always available). Then there exists a simple polynomial transformation of the class-teacher assignment problem with teacher availability constraints (CTTA) in school timetable construction to the PTCS problem: namely, map class instances to teacher instances, teacher instances to parent instances, time slots to time slots (identity map), and teacher availability to parent availability. So if the PTCS problem were polynomial-time solvable by some algorithm, the transformation described above and the algorithm could be used to solve the CTTA problem too and the CTTA task would be polynomially solvable as well. But CTTA has been earlier proved to be NP-complete by the reduction from the NP-complete 3-SAT problem , so the PTC scheduling problem cannot be polynomially solvable either, and has to be NP-complete.

Computationally, the scheduling problem is a constraint satisfaction problem that is NP-complete and in the same complexity class with ...

Assuming that a school has 1000 students who each take 5 core subjects with diferent teachers, 5000 interviews would need to be scheduled.

Complexity reduction can be achieved by diminishing the search space, almost best (probabilistic,)

Diminsihing the search space means reducing the number of different time slots and locations that need to be allocated by grouping participants together (one-to-many and many-to-one meetings), freeing more time slots for meetings, e.g. by shortening school days for several days.

-- NO? shortening time slots (from 10 min to 5 min), so that there are more slots in a given period and more meetings can be scheduled in the same period (so the overall duration can be shortened e.g. from 5 days to 2 days)

Almost best solution can be achieved by

Algorithms

Algorithms suitable for scheduling meetings include genetic algorithms,

Management

Optimized scheduling is advanatgeous only as long as the participants keep to the schedlule by attending the meetings and starting and finishing on time. The latter can be achieved by a school bell or electronic voice-over message played over the school PA system, at each change of interview time (E.g. "Please move to your next interview"), avoiding to schedule very short interview times that are harder to keep running on time, scheduling empty slots at intervals to assist in bringing events back onto time if they are running over. General time management techniques apply.

Discussion

Efficiency

A common observation from teachers is that it's the parents who they don't need to see who attend interviews, while parents who should attend often don't.

Parent-teacher conferences have been criticized for their class bias. Often only the most privileged children's parents will attend the interviews and the children who are more likely to need extra assistance will not have their parents attend.

See also

Educational assessment Personal development planning Parent Teacher Organization

External links

• A video of a PT meeting.
• A list of parent-teacher conference scheduling software