Homeschool Parent-Teacher Meetings

My husband and I have little parent-teacher meetings to make sure that he is up to date on changes and progress for both our students’ educations. They range anywhere from 5 minutes to 45 minutes depending on the time of year and the amount of stuff we’ve got to go over.

I also hold little meetings with myself as well. I house those here in case the hubs decides to catch up—or for my own reference later on. Here’s how we approach parent-teacher meetings in our homeschool.

Our Homeschool Parent-Teacher Meetings Format

To help make them less painful, I opted to give them a cute little name and bring our favorite beverages every time, much like our money meetings. We talk about where our kids are currently and how we can help guide them to the next level.

Most meetings are simply sectioned off Check-In and Action Items. When we are having our bigger meetings (New School Year, Mid-Year, New Session, etc.) the format is broken down just like it is below.

Start

We usually start the meeting with either this section or the next because one of us (generally me) has an approach or change to propose to the other. This is where we list out things we will be introducing in the next instructional homeschool Session.

Stop

Habits or routines that have started developing and aren’t working for whatever reason will go here. It helps us to remember what we weren’t liking and why. We also try and replace them with better ideas in the Start section.

Continue

This is when we talk about what we are loving, enjoying, and hoping to continue implementing in our homeschool. I might also call this the What’s Working portion. Reflecting on why certain things are working helps me later on when I sometimes don’t feel as motivated.

Action Items

We end each of these meetings with a short list of action items, so that we remember to follow up with them in the next meeting. I’m pretty sure there is a way to copy the whole block into the next page automatically, but I haven’t bothered to figure that out yet. Because we schedule our next meeting at this time, I just copy the list as a synced block into the next meeting’s page.

Tracking Our Homeschool Parent-Teacher Meetings in Notion

I opted to keep all of our little meetings in a Notion database for a few reasons. First, I like looking back on history at little snapshots in time—hello I’m a scrapbooker. It makes me feel nice. Outside of that though, being able to track exactly when we made a pivot in our approach, as well as the reasoning behind it, is always useful. We are constantly on the move and I just can’t remember the little steps we have taken over the years, nor do I truly want to keep all of that in my mind. We decided to section off a separate database for these meetings so that they could be linked to applicable school Sessions, Lessons, Students, etc. and be easily accessible any time.

It also helps that each database is only housed in each academic year. For some families it may prove useful to hold all meetings in one database and just group them out by their respective year or even months, though. You could even tag them by semesters.

We kept the properties pretty simple, since we knew each page would be heavily linked to so much other information. Each meeting has a spot for Date & Time, Attendees, Objective(s), and of course the Students discussed. I’ve got a template in this blog post for you to reference, you can Duplicate it in the top right hand corner by clicking on the three dots. Totally free, so enjoy.