Who's doing the talking? Teacher and parent experiences of parent-teacher conferences

dc.creator	E M Lemmer
dc.date	2012-01-01T00:00:00Z
dc.date.accessioned	2015-07-20T22:12:14Z
dc.date.available	2015-07-20T22:12:14Z
dc.identifier	0256-0100
dc.identifier	2076-3433
dc.identifier	https://doaj.org/article/dbcd14f7611842ea8eadc5dde6d0ef51
dc.identifier.uri	http://evidence.thinkportal.org/handle/123456789/15071
dc.description	The most common form of direct communication between parents and teachers in schools worldwide is the parent-teacher conference. Purposeful parent-teacher conferences afford the teacher and the parent the opportunity to address a particular topic related to the child, such as academic progress and behaviour. However, teachers are seldom trained to interact with parents, and both parents and teachers often find such encounters stressful and ineffective. This paper investigates parent and teacher perspectives on the parent-teacher conference through a qualitative inquiry. This is framed by the contributions of ecological theorists to home-school communication and an overview of extant themes in the literature. In the present qualitative inquiry, teacher, parent and learner participants were selected by purposeful and snowball sampling and data were gathered by individual and focus group interviews, school visits and the perusal of written parent-teacher conference reports. The findings indicate that parent-teacher conferences are ritualised school events in all types of schools; parents and teachers' expectations of conferences are limited; teachers are not trained to conduct parent-teacher conferences; and conferencesare overwhelmingly directed at problem solution. Parent-teacher conferences are characterised by a client orientation to parents, rather than a partnership orientation to home-school relations.
dc.language	English
dc.publisher	Education Association of South Africa (EASA)
dc.relation	http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0256-01002012000100007
dc.relation	https://doaj.org/toc/0256-0100
dc.relation	https://doaj.org/toc/2076-3433
dc.source	South African Journal of Education, Vol 32, Iss 1, Pp 83-96 (2012)
dc.subject	Education (General)
dc.subject	L7-991
dc.subject	Education
dc.subject	L
dc.subject	DOAJ:Education
dc.subject	DOAJ:Social Sciences
dc.subject	Education (General)
dc.subject	L7-991
dc.subject	Education
dc.subject	L
dc.subject	DOAJ:Education
dc.subject	DOAJ:Social Sciences
dc.subject	Education (General)
dc.subject	L7-991
dc.subject	Education
dc.subject	L
dc.subject	Education (General)
dc.subject	L7-991
dc.subject	Education
dc.subject	L
dc.subject	Education (General)
dc.subject	L7-991
dc.subject	Education
dc.subject	L
dc.title	Who's doing the talking? Teacher and parent experiences of parent-teacher conferences
dc.type	article