Communication

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?