Parentella

The biggest change I’m making in my planning for the start of the new school year is in how often I will communicate with parents. Communicating with parents requires effort, openness, clarity, and regularity. Let’s examine each of these.

Effort

Communicating with parents is not in the curriculum and not something taught in education classes. Too often, the only times teachers communicate with parents is when something is wrong; a child misbehaves or is injured somehow.  It is important to work at spreading good news, too.

But teachers already have so much to do. Where are we going to find the time to communicate with parents? Build it in to what you already do. Are you on Facebook or Twitter? Start a Facebook list of parents and limit what they can see. One post a week is all it take. Or start a Twitter account and only let parents see those tweets.

And, of course, there is Parentella. Parentella is a private parent-teacher social network. Teachers can create their private online classroom and invite parents to the class. Teachers can post homework, class news, events, and reminders to keep parents engaged in their kids’ educational lives.

Openness

Communication is a two-way street. When information flows in one direction only it is a lecture or an advertisement, but it is not communication. Good communication is about receiving information or other feedback as much as delivering information.

Listening with attention is a skill we ask our students to master and we have to do it also. As we teach our students, listening is more than keeping one’s mouth shut while someone else is talking and it is not planning what you will say. Listening is hearing, processing and considering what someone else has to say. We need to model it in our interactions with others.

Clarity

Like any other area of human endeavor, education has jargon. I wrote a paper as an undergrad in which I speculated that education in a particular field is merely the process of coming to understand what the jargon means. Parents don’t understand education jargon.

Practice clarity. Write and speak in clear, jargon-free English (or other language you share). Don’t sound like an education jargon generator.

One more thing, proofread! My wife is a copy editor and she catches every error in the notes and notices that come from our son’s school; there are far too many and some of the most aggravating ones would have been caught had the writer just read the item out loud. Trust your ears, if it sounds wrong, it probably is wrong.

Regularity

I have a colleague who teaches some children with very challenging emotional and behavioral issues. She is one of the few teachers I know who talks to parents with regularity; she calls the parents of all nine of her students every day. It needn’t be that often, but it is important to contact parents on a regular basis.

When my wife or I would pick up our son at the end of the school day and ask him what happened he’d respond, “stuff.” He’s going to be a junior in high school this year and all that’s ever happened at school is ‘stuff.’  Parents want to know what’s going on in class, what the class is studying, what’s coming up next, and more.

In the past I’ve given the parents of my students my email address and my cell-phone number, and I’ve left it up to them to contact me. This year I’m going to be more proactive. I’m going to email or call all parents at least once a week with general information about school and class events, also with information about all the great work their child is doing. Parents need to hear good news even more than they need to hear all the trouble their son or daughter causes.

When I was student teaching in a 2nd grade class, the teacher guided the students in the collaborative writing of a weekly newsletter. Every Friday after lunch, the boys and girls would draw illustrations for the missive. I wonder if that would work in 7th and 8th grade. Hmmmm.