Parentella

As an educator in my twelfth year of teaching, I’ve had my share of meetings with parents. There have been Back to School Night “conferences,” “junior was misbehaving, so please come meet with me” conferences, and more. There are a few things that I have found that work well with regards to the special relationship between parents and teachers.

- Have a student-led conference. If there’s an issue about poor grades, have work available for mom and dad to look at, and, rather than do the talking, have the student explain the work, his/her grade, and why that grade occurred. Any other way of doing this, I have found, comes off as accusatory.

- Open door policy. I tell parents they are welcome to come in for a conference (or at least to chat) any day and at any time–without an appointment. I let parents know this, as well as the students, at the beginning of the year. Parents appreciate this, and you will get the approval/trust of parents at a very high level. Students have it in the backs of their minds that at any moment a parent could walk in. Even if a parent comes at a “bad” time, certainly a moment or two can be spared to chat.

- Since conferences tend to be about negative things, I do my best to add positive. Student (or any human) self-esteem suffers when hearing only the negative, and all too often,  parent/teacher communication tends to be very negative (e.g. Junior cheated on a test; his behavior is terrible). I do something called “gems and opportunities.” Problems are opportunities for solutions, so I try to mold the bad into a challenge. For every opportunity (problem) discussed, I try to add at least two “gems.” Anything positive can be a gem. This is important because if all we hear is negative, we as humans will start to believe only bad about ourselves. Consider this: Junior is getting a C- in math. I would say there’s room for improvement (opportunity), and I’d add two gems–perhaps that he/she does very well with fractions, or saying, “you’re so close to a higher grade.” This will pay dividends (no pun intended) for all.

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Mr. Franklin is a teacher for the Los Angeles Unified School District. He is an eleven year veteran and has won District and County Teacher of the Year awards. He was also a recipient of the prestigious Bank of America Community Hero award. Before teaching, he spent five years at Learning Forum, which runs summer camps designed to increase student academic potential. It is a world-wide program.

Related posts:

1. Student Participation in Parent Teacher Interviews
2. Back to School: Parent Teacher Conference Ideas
3. Parent Teacher Communication: A Teacher’s Perspective
4. Balancing Parent Teacher Communication
5. Parent-Teacher Conferences

Tags: Parent teacher communication, parent-teacher conferences

This entry was posted on Monday, November 1st, 2010 at 12:01 am and is filed under Parent teacher communication, Steve Franklin, Teacher Perspectives. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.