Positive Parent Communication
Today I was talking on the phone with my brother who is about to attend his first Back to School Night as a parent. We joked about him asking all the “hard-ball” questions to his son's teacher… but then it hit me. What is it that parents hope to get from back to school at night? How can we make the most of our little time together?
Shortly after our conversation, I saw this tweet that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about…
In Street Data (2021) by Shane Safir and Jamila Dugan, we learn about the indigenaous and village mentality which shows how family and individual cultural experiences work together to help guide our learners into what they are meant to be (p. 9-10). Yet, so many of our families are isolated from our school community. How can we bring our families into our school community and model the indigenous way of working together?
First, we need to look to our families and “village elders,” (Street Data, 2021, p. 9) to share their community wisdom and guide us to success. As it says in the tweet, school improvement should be “done with [our students and families].” I think we should make a conscious effort to understand what parents need for their families and want for their children. We should foster constant communication and collaboration with our families to work together to support our students. We should talk with our families, send our surveys, and do whatever we can to get their input on the goings-on in the school.
Second, we need more positive communication with families. My inspiration came from the following tweet…
It can improve on-task behavior and decrease disruptions (as mentioned in the article). It also creates a learning partnership for our learners. There is a team of adults that see them, hear them, and have their back. Similarly, parents and teachers can feel supported by each other when making our educational decisions.
What are other ways we can create a strong partnership between teachers, families, and students?
This is a great thought starter post. I really wish I had read this before my school did back to school night. How meaningful could it be to ask families something they want to hear during back to school night? Also could we use a survey at the end of the night to see what families thought was most beneficial as we plan for the next school year's back to school night. Fostering the school-family-community connection is extremely important and helpful for all students. My school tries to create stronger relationships with the community and families by offering a variety of engagement opportunities from academic help, to parent workshops, and family picnics.
ReplyDeleteCould not agree more with the idea of fostering those positive parent communications and keeping that line of communication open. What a great way to show that you care by catering to their needs and interests to better show them what the classroom setting looks like. I love the idea of surveying what parents might want to hear and adjusting the presentation accordingly because of that. I know that this year, I had no new students to my school so I was able to completely skip over Benchmark Reading Curriculum since all parents had heard about it in the past and we had no new updates. This allowed for much more time for parents to talk to me about my routines, classroom structure and general questions about how I run my classroom.
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