Depersonalizing troubles in institutional interaction: Routinizing in parent-teacher conferences.

This article investigates how teachers depersonalize student troubles during parent–teacher conferences by treating the focal student's difficulties as non-unique cases, a practice termed "routinizing." Routinizing involves teachers citing their first-hand experience with other similar cases to situate a student's academic, behavioral, or effort-related problems as common, thereby enacting their professional expertise and licensing their authority in advising parents or caregivers. The study, based on three years of ethnographic fieldwork and conversation analysis of 41 recorded conferences across diverse schools in the western United States, shows that routinizing serves both responsive functions—affiliating with and reassuring parents—and proactive functions—pre-empting parental resistance to assessments. This practice leverages the asymmetry in knowledge between teachers, who have a universalistic overview of many students, and parents, who have particularistic knowledge of their own child, enabling teachers to manage institutional interaction effectively by attenuating and credentialing their advice.