Student-Led Conferences: Empowering Students through Self-Assessment and Reflection

There is a serious need to reconsider the adult-led, grade-centered parent teacher meetings which are standard school practice. Schools and students would benefit from elevating PTMs with student voice and formative assessment that celebrates students' efforts and motivates them to continue learning. Under a reinvented framework for meetings, educators can redefine achievement, moving away from explicit focus on grades and behavior, and towards the exciting process of learning. This paper expounds the argument that students learn better when they are empowered with tools that assess both their learning and their attitudes towards learning; moreover, it champions student-led meetings as a sustainable replacement to parent-teacher meetings, by narrating the transformation of the meetings at a private English-medium middle school in Pakistan.