We’ve just finished up our
“spring” conferences (with our below zero temperatures and multiple feet of
snow, it doesn’t feel anything like spring), and I am part of a school team
that is working together to move our school to Title One status next year, and
both opportunities have left me thinking a lot about parent communication. It’s
clear that both as a teacher and a school, we have room for improvement.
It isn’t that I don’t communicate.
I do. In fact, I think I provide a fair amount of information about what is
going on in my classroom. I send home a newsletter (we started with biweekly,
but have moved to a monthly calendar, which my wonderful partner teacher also
emails to families with email accounts), and I update my website each week,
listing my homework requirements and providing links to copies of the homework,
in case a student has misplaced it. I let parents know about this in each
monthly newsletter, and I told each family about this at the fall conferences
in October. However, I still found myself telling families this same thing
again at our spring conferences, especially those families that said, "When I ask my child if they have homework, they always say no." Sorry to say, not all kids are reliable reporters, so I have my homework online.
Our school sends home a monthly
newsletter as well, but I’m pretty sure that like our monthly calendar, many
families don’t have time to read it. An additional concern is the language barrier that a number
of our families face; long sheets in English don’t help if you don’t speak or
read English.
So I’m trying to think of ways
that would be more effective in reaching more families without putting in
additional large amounts of time. Our school has a Facebook account, and a
number of families have “liked” that, but our principal pointed out that a
large number of the likes are from staff members. I think if we were to post
things more regularly on that page, we might find more people checking it out,
and I think our staff is interested in exploring that.
Another idea that we tried to
start using this fall is Remind 101, a very slick text message reminder system
that would have allowed us to send out text message reminders about homework
due dates, field trips, or special days at school. The teacher can set up
messages in advance on his/her computer or cell phone, set the time for them to
be delivered, and the parent then receives the message in a timely way. The parent
cannot send a reply back, so the teacher’s privacy with regards to his or her
own cell phone remains intact. I would have loved to use this but our district
has currently said no due to privacy concerns. It isn’t meant for emailing
individual concerns about students, but someone needs to convince our district
of that.
I’ve also read about a number of
classrooms in other districts using a class Twitter page to update families. I
think this would be fun, and I would train students to write something each day
and then they could type it up. I don’t know how many families are on Twitter,
but I’d be interested in exploring this further. At this point in time, I
believe our district has said no to this as well.
Finally, I need to find ways to
more effectively communicate with families who are not English speakers. I
think there are translating programs or tools online that I may investigate for written work,
and lately I’ve been thinking about writing up some kind of script and having
my students who speak that language be filmed saying the script in their native
language. I would then put it on my webpage and show all the students in my
classes, who could tell their families at home to watch it.
What are the best ways you’ve
found to communicate with families?
