It is early October and, in many Italian high schools, the general parent-teacher meetings arrive between October and November, usually before the class councils in November. The exact dates change from school to school: you will find them on the electronic register or in the school office’s notices. On that occasion each teacher gives each parent a few minutes — often about ten if you are lucky, sometimes fewer if the queue is long. Those who arrive without an outline leave with the phrase “it’s all going fairly well” or “he needs to make more of an effort”, and nothing changes at home.
This post is about using those minutes well. It is not a guide to “defending” your child, nor to judging the teacher: it is a method for going home with three concrete pieces of information and a plan.
Before the meeting: half an hour of preparation
The real work is done in the days before.
1. Look at the register calmly. Grades, absences, notes, topics covered. Not to make a list of errors, but to see a trend: are the grades in one subject going up or down? Do the failing grades come after absences? Are the written tests going worse than the oral ones, or the other way round?
2. Look at the marked tests, if there are any. Ask your child to show them to you. A 5 with three careless calculation mistakes tells a different story from a 5 where the test was left half done because he or she did not know how to begin. You don’t need to understand the subject: you need to see where the red marks are, whether they are scattered or concentrated on one type of exercise.
3. Talk to him or her first. Ten minutes of conversation, without an interrogation: “Which subjects are going well? Where do you feel most in difficulty? Is there a teacher whose explanations lose you?”. In high school this step changes the meeting a great deal, and I come back to it below.
4. Write three questions, not ten. With about ten minutes ahead of you, three well-chosen questions are worth more than a list you will never finish. Pick them from the next section, adapted to the subject.
If you have no idea of the student’s real level and want an objective reference before sitting down in front of the teacher, you can have him or her take one of the high school practice tests: it is not compulsory, but it gives an indication of what holds up and what doesn’t, and makes the questions more concrete.
The questions that really help
“Where did he or she lose most marks in the last tests?”
This is the most useful question of all, because it forces the teacher to move from a general judgement (“he’s inconsistent”) to a fact (“in exercises with algebraic fractions he always gets the sign wrong”). A fact can be trained.
“In your view, is it a gap, a problem of method or a problem of attention?”
The three causes call for different remedies:
- Gap: a foundation is missing (first-degree equations that are not solid, the table of declensions never absorbed). You recover by going back and revising the earlier topics, not by studying the current ones harder.
- Method: the student studies, but badly (rereads without practising, studies the night before, never asks questions). You recover by changing the way, and a block-based study plan with a calendar is a good starting point.
- Attention: in class he or she is distracted, forgets homework and materials, loses the thread. Here you need to understand whether it is a matter of concentration or of something around it (tiredness, the phone, a change of class, a difficult relationship).
Often they are mixed together. Asking the teacher which weighs most gives you an order of priority.
“What should he or she be able to do in the next three weeks?”
This is the question that turns the meeting into a plan. Ask it almost always, in any subject. If the answer is “he needs to study more”, insist gently: “More on which topic? Is there a test coming up? What should he be able to do for it to count as passed?”. You need a goal that can be checked, for example “solve complete second-degree equations correctly” or “translate sentences with cum and the subjunctive without a dictionary”.
“How is the test marked?”
Many parents don’t ask it, and it would be the most revealing. In several subjects there is a marking scheme (maths, written Italian, languages): ask whether it is available and how much weight goes to working, accuracy of calculations, completeness and presentation. A student may get a 5 not because he or she “doesn’t know”, but because exercises are left half done or the steps are not written out. With the scheme in front of you, the marking becomes readable.
“What can he or she do at school to catch up?”
If the school offers help desks, catch-up courses or catch-up oral tests, ask how they work and how to book them. And ask whether your child takes part in class: asks questions, speaks up, makes himself or herself seen? The teacher knows, and this information counts as much as a grade.
What not to ask
- “Is he or she gifted at the subject?” No teacher can honestly answer this in two months, and any answer does harm: if it is “no”, your child hears a label; if it is “yes”, he or she relaxes. Ability in maths, Latin or physics is built with targeted practice. Better: “What comes more easily and what costs more effort?”.
- “Why did he or she get this grade?” said in a tone of complaint, it shuts the dialogue down at once. Try: “Can you help me understand what went wrong in this test?”.
- Comparisons with classmates. “How are the others doing?” tells you nothing useful for your child and makes the person answering uncomfortable.
- A request for a “higher” grade. A meeting is not the place to negotiate grades. If you think an assessment is wrong, the proper way is to ask to review the test and understand the criteria, without ultimatums.
How to read vague answers
Some answers are heard often and are almost always generic — not out of ill will, but because teachers have dozens of families to meet.
| What you hear | What to ask next |
|---|---|
| “He’s a good kid, but he needs to make more of an effort.” | “Where do you see the effort missing: homework, studying, participation? Can you give me a recent example?” |
| “He’s inconsistent.” | “In which tests did he do well and in which badly? Is there anything that sets them apart?” |
| “He has gaps.” | “On which topics? Are they the same as last year or new ones?” |
| “He needs to study more at home.” | “What should he actually do in a normal week? How many hours of exercises?” |
| “He gets distracted.” | “Does it happen in every lesson or only some? Have you noticed a change compared with last year?” |
The idea is always the same: move from the adjective to the example, and from the example to an action. If you cannot get that in ten minutes, ask whether you can write to the teacher, by email or through the register, with a single follow-up question. Many teachers are happy to answer a precise question.
If instead the meeting brings out more structural difficulties — slowness in writing, trouble reading and organising oneself, difficulty with attention — it is worth finding out how the school’s support tools work. I wrote about this in PDP and PEI: the difference and how to ask the school for them (these are the personalised learning plans Italian schools use for students with specific learning difficulties or other special needs). It is not a step to be taken in a hurry, nor ruled out from the start: the meeting may be the right moment to raise the question.
After the meeting: a three-week plan
As soon as you leave, write down three lines straight away (while memory is fresh): what the teacher said, what you understood, what is unclear. Then turn it all into a short plan with a near deadline.
Three weeks is a good length: long enough to see an effect, short enough not to lose interest. The plan has three parts.
- A measurable goal. Not “do better in maths”, but “solve eight second-degree equations out of ten without sign errors” or “reach the next test having done all the exercises in the chapter and corrected the mistakes”. A goal is measurable when, at the end of the period, both of you can say whether it was reached.
- A concrete habit. For example forty minutes of exercises, three times a week, on days fixed in the calendar, correcting mistakes in the notebook. I describe it in detail in the block-based study plan.
- A checkpoint. Halfway through (after ten days) you sit down for five minutes with your child: what worked, what didn’t. If the goal is too high or too low, you adjust it.
To know where to restart when the difficulty is in maths, on the maths page I explain how I set up the work and which topics trip students up most often at the start of the year.
Talking about it with your child: not hiding behind the teacher
This is the most delicate part and it matters more than all the rest. The meeting must not turn into “I talked to the teacher and he said that…” in the tone of a verdict. In high school young people feel judged twice: by the grade and by the account an adult gives of it in their absence.
A few approaches that work:
- Say what you heard, including the positive things, first and precisely. “She said that you listen in class and set up physics problems well” is a fact, not a pat on the head.
- Present the difficulties as a problem to solve together, not as a fault. “He said you lose marks in calculations with fractions: how do you see it?” opens a conversation; “you got a 5 because you don’t study” closes it.
- Ask him or her to propose the goal for the three weeks. A plan chosen together is followed more willingly than one that is imposed.
- Don’t promise on his or her behalf things the teacher hasn’t asked for, and don’t take on commitments you cannot check.
When it is better for your child to come with you
It is not always right to turn up alone. A student in Year 4 or Year 5 of high school is often able to take part in the meeting, and in certain cases it is the best choice: when the problem concerns the relationship with the teacher itself, when a clarification is needed on how a test was marked, or when a catch-up plan has to be agreed that only makes sense if the student understands and accepts it directly. With a student in the first two years the choice depends on character: some freeze, others grow a lot from seeing the adult and the teacher talk about them with respect. If you have doubts, ask beforehand: the answer already tells you something.
If you need a second opinion
Sometimes, after the meeting, the picture is still unclear: the teacher says “gaps” and it is not clear to you which ones, or the failing grade keeps recurring and you don’t know whether it is a matter of foundations or of method. In these cases a short check outside the classroom helps bring things into focus, without judgements and without grades. If you’d like to talk it over, from the contact page you can book a free introductory call: we look at tests and notebooks together and I tell you what I see. For the specific case of a first failing grade at the start of the year, there is a path in the post on the first failing grade in October, and if you are wondering how serious a situation is across several subjects, there is how many failing grades lead to being held back.
In short, the card to take with you
Three lines to copy onto your phone before going in:
- Where did he or she lose most marks in the last tests?
- Is it a gap, a problem of method or a problem of attention?
- What should he or she be able to do in the next three weeks, and how will it be assessed?
With these three questions and about ten minutes well used, the meeting stops being a formality and becomes the first step of a plan.
