Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-4rdpn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-18T05:24:13.171Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Criticizing another's child: How teachers evaluate students during parent-teacher conferences

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2016

Danielle Pillet-Shore
Danielle Pillet-Shore*
Affiliation:
Department of Communication, University of New Hampshire Durham, NH 03824, [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

As the principal occasion for establishing cooperation between family and school, the parent-teacher conference is crucial to the social and educational lives of children. But there is a problem: reports of parent-teacher conflict pervade extant literature. Previous studies do not, however, explain how conflict emerges in real time or how conflict is often avoided during conferences. This article examines a diverse corpus of video-recorded naturally occurring conferences to elucidate a structural preference organization operative during parent-teacher interaction that enables participants to forestall conflict. Focusing on teachers' conduct around student-praise and student-criticism, this investigation demonstrates that teachers do extra interactional work when articulating student-criticism. This research explicates two of teachers' most regular actions constituting this extra work: obfuscating responsibility for student-troubles by omitting explicit reference to the student, and routinizing student-troubles by invoking other comparable cases of that same trouble. Analysis illuminates teachers' work to maintain solidarity with students, and thus parents. (Institutional interaction, parent-teacher conferences, conversation analysis, criticism, praise, evaluating students, assessments, preference organization)*

Type
Articles
Information
Language in Society , Volume 45 , Issue 1 , February 2016 , pp. 33 - 58
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Attanucci, Jane S. (2004). Questioning honor: A parent-teacher conflict over excellence and diversity in a USA urban high school. Journal of Moral Education 33(1):57–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baumeister, Roy; Bratslavsky, Ellen; Finkenauer, Catrin; & Vohs, Kathleen (2001). Bad is stronger than good. Review of General Psychology 5(4):323–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brown, Penelope, & Levinson, Stephen C. (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Drew, Paul, & Heritage, John (eds.) (1992). Talk at work: Interaction in institutional settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Driscoll, Gertrude (1944). The parent-teacher conference. Teachers College Record 45(7):463–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Erickson, Frederick, & Shultz, Jeffrey (1982). The counselor as gatekeeper: Social interactions in interviews. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving (1967). Interaction ritual: Essays in face-to-face behavior. Chicago, IL: Aldine.Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving (1981). Footing. In Goffman, Erving (ed.), Forms of talk, 124–59. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Goodwin, Charles (1979). The interactive construction of a sentence in natural conversation. In Psathas, George (ed.), Everyday language: Studies in ethnomethodology, 97–121. New York: Irvington.Google Scholar
Harvard Family Research Project (2010). Parent-teacher conference tip sheets for principals, teachers, and parents. Online: www.hfrp.org; accessed June 7, 2012.Google Scholar
Heinemann, Trine, & Traverso, Veronique (2009). Complaining in interaction. Journal of Pragmatics 41(12):2381–578.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heritage, John (1984). Garfinkel and ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Heritage, John (1997). Conversation analysis and institutional talk: Analyzing data. In Silverman, David (ed.), Qualitative research: Theory, method and practice, 161–82. London: Sage.Google Scholar
Heritage, John (2002). Oh-prefaced responses to assessments: A method of modifying agreement/disagreement. In Ford, Cecilia, Fox, Barbara, & Thompson, Sandra (eds.), The language of turn and sequence, 196–224. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jefferson, Gail (1979). A technique for inviting laughter and its subsequent acceptance/declination. In Psathas, George (ed.), Everyday language: Studies in ethnomethodology, 79–96. New York: Irvington.Google Scholar
Jefferson, Gail (1988). On the sequential organization of troubles talk in ordinary conversation. Social Problems 35(4):418–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lawrence-Lightfoot, Sara (2003). The essential conversation: What parents and teachers can learn from each other. New York: Ballantine Books.Google Scholar
Lemmer, Eleanor (2012). Who's doing the talking? Teacher and parent experiences of parent- teacher conferences. South African Journal of Education 32(1):83–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lerner, Gene H. (2013). On the place of hesitating in delicate formulations: A turn- constructional infrastructure for collaborative indiscretion. In Sidnell, Jack, Hayashi, Makoto, & Raymond, Geoffrey (eds.), Conversational repair and human understanding, 95–134. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Maynard, Douglas (1992). On clinicians’ co-implicating recipients’ perspective in the delivery of diagnostic news. In Drew, Paul & Heritage, John (eds.), Talk at work: Interaction in institutional settings, 331–58. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Maynard, Douglas (2003). Bad news, good news: Conversational order in everyday talk and clinical settings. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Minke, Kathleen M., & Anderson, Kellie J. (2003). Restructuring routine parent-teacher conferences: The family-school conference model. The Elementary School Journal 104(1):49–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Oh, Sun-Young (2006). English zero anaphora as an interactional resource II. Discourse Studies 8(6):817–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pillet, Danielle (2001). ‘Doing pretty well’: How teachers manage the interactional environment of unfavorable student evaluation in parent-teacher conferences. Los Angeles: University of California, Los Angeles M.A. thesis.Google Scholar
Pillet-Shore, Danielle (2006). Weighing in primary-care nurse-patient interactions. Social Science and Medicine 62(2):407–21.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pillet-Shore, Danielle (2011). Doing introductions: The work involved in meeting someone new. Communication Monographs 78(1):73–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pillet-Shore, Danielle (2012). The problems with praise in parent-teacher interaction. Communication Monographs 79(2):181–204.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pillet-Shore, Danielle (2014). Criticizing another's child: How teachers evaluate students during parent-teacher conferences. Paper presented at the 100th Annual Convention of the National Communication Association, Chicago, Illinois.Google Scholar
Pillet-Shore, Danielle (2015a). Being a ‘good parent’ in parent-teacher conferences. Journal of Communication 65(2):373–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pillet-Shore, Danielle (2015b). Complaints. In Tracy, Karen, Ilie, Cornelia, & Sandel, Todd (eds.), The international encyclopedia of language and social interaction. Boston: John Wiley & Sons.Google Scholar
Pillet-Shore, Danielle (2015c). Calling attention to mutually-perceivable features of the scene: How registering works when opening face-to-face interaction. Paper accepted for presentation at the International Institute for Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis. Kolding, Denmark, August 4–7.Google Scholar
Pomerantz, Anita (1980). Telling my side: ‘Limited access’ as a ‘fishing’ device. Sociological Inquiry 50(3–4):186–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rabbitt, James A. (1978). The parent/teacher conference: Trauma or teamwork? The Phi Delta Kappan 59(7):471–72.Google Scholar
Raymond, Geoffrey (2004). Prompting action: The stand-alone ‘so’ in ordinary conversation. Research on Language and Social Interaction 37(2):185–218.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Robinson, Jeffrey, & Bolden, Galina (2010). Preference organization of sequence-initiating actions: The case of explicit account solicitations. Discourse Studies 12(4):501–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sacks, Harvey (1972). On the analyzability of stories by children. In Gumperz, John & Hymes, Dell (eds.), Directions in sociolinguistics: The ethnography of communication, 325–45. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.Google Scholar
Sacks, Harvey; Schegloff, Emanuel A.; & Jefferson, Gail (1974). A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language 50(4):696–735.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schegloff, Emanuel A. (1992). Repair after next turn: The last structurally provided defense of intersubjectivity in conversation. American Journal of Sociology 97(5):1295–345.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schegloff, Emanuel A. (1996). Some practices for referring to persons in talk-in-interaction: A partial sketch of a systematics. In Fox, Barbara (ed.), Studies in anaphora, 437–85. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schegloff, Emanuel A. (2007a). Sequence organization in interaction: A primer in conversation analysis, vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schegloff, Emanuel A. (2007b). A tutorial on membership categorization. Journal of Pragmatics 39:462–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Starr, Paul (1982). The social transformation of American medicine. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Tracy, Karen; van Dusen, Donna; & Robinson, Susan (1987). ‘Good’ and ‘bad’ criticism: A descriptive analysis. Communication 37(2):46–59.Google Scholar
Tracy, Karen; van Dusen, Donna, & Eisenberg, Eric (1990). Giving criticism: A multiple goals case study. Research on Language and Social Interaction 24:37–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Waller, Willard (1932). The sociology of teaching. New York: John Wiley & Sons.CrossRefGoogle Scholar