Parent Communication and Building Parent Relationships

Parent Communication and Building Parent Relationships By Ashley Ewert

So we have built relationships and made connections with the students… What’s next?

A student's journey of learning begins the moment they are born. Their first teachers are their parents and families. Learning does not just happen in the classroom but also at home. Many parents are the best models for a child. The importance of active parent involvement in their child’s education promotes a positive impact on academic and social performance of a child. Parent involvement in education included communication between parent and teacher, and the relationship between parent and teacher. Parent teacher communication can be challenging at times due to working parents and language barriers. I have found a way to help keep a strong, positive and open communication system with the families of my students. Students show greater success in the classroom when teachers and parents are on the same page and parent and teachers respect each other’s environment. I always make it a priority to build relationships with the families from the beginning of the school year. As a teacher, knowing the environments students are coming from helps a great deal in making connections and building relationships, as I discussed in my August 2019 blog (Building Relationships and Making connections)

Effective Parent Communication

Families have busy lives; communicating with their children's teachers just adds one more thing to their plate. Technology has helped this barrier. Ever heard of the saying "there's an app for that." well let me tell you there are apps out there that promote parent teacher communication. I want to share with you one of my favorites.

ClassDojo is a communication app that connects parents, families and teachers to things going on in the classroom. ClassDojo has many features but for the sake of this blog let's focus solely focus on the communication aspect between the parents and the teacher. This app offers effective communication with parents and teachers. It allows the teacher to be in charge of when he/she will receive messages. The teacher may also post pictures of activities going on in the classroom so families have conservation starters they can use at home. The best thing about this app is that it will translate into most any language the parent sets up their profile to. The parents and message and comment in their native language and the teacher can see a translated version of the message or comment. What better way to start success in the classroom than building that effective parent communication through an app that promotes connecting families and teachers. 

Building Parent Relationships

Parent and teacher relationships have an advantage on student success. Parents spend a lot of time teaching and teachers spend a lot of time parenting. so lets face it there tends to be a lot of overlap. When teachers and parents are on the same page students achieve better in both settings. When teachers and parents build positive and strong relationship being on the same page tends to be more achievable. Here are three simple ideas to help build healthy parent and teacher relationships:

1. Communicate Regularly: Open communication is essential on both sides. Email and classroom communication apps (ClassDojo) is a great way to maintain an open connection. Even students struggle with life situations (like a parent’s or sibling’s illness, pending divorce, parental stress) at home. Communicating with families will help to understand why students are performing in the way they are.  Students who are unhappy and kids who are excited are often distracted from school work.
2.  Lead With Good and Positive News: Give positive praise first when calling parents or meeting with them to discuss a concern. Every student has something good about them. Find it. Share it. Then share your concern. Adhere strictly to this rule.
3. Smile When You See Parents: Greet them with intention. Most parents only occasionally interact with teachers so be sure that encounters with them are positive, warm, and friendly. The impressions last a long time especially first impressions. :-)

"To teach is to touch a life forever." -Anonymous

Ashley Ewert

Conferencing with Students = Communicating with Parents (part 3)

Conferencing with Students =

Communicating with Parents (part 3)

    What a difference a school year makes!  Remember the first week of August when you received your students entering the classroom for the first time?  Questions swirled around your head:  Will I be an effective teacher?  Will they LOVE learning in my classroom?  Can I build their character, self-esteem, and confidence?  What will be my challenges?  Well – we find ourselves at that time of year to “wrap it up” and we feel excited as we reflect on the outcomes.  Do our students think or feel the same way?

Teachers reflect all the time!  So how can I produce reflective students?

          As you have noticed if you’ve read my previous posts, I have focused on conferencing with students in order to facilitate student reflection and then share this  with parents.  I have used familiar tools/resources such as Renaissance Learning (Accelerated Reader) since these provide quick reports that can be used in a student conferencing session.  At our school site, our wonderful principal has created a Principal’s "Challenge" in which each grade level is challenged to gain a certain amount of reading points (through computer quizzes).  These challenges are six-weeks in length.  Incentives include an extra recess, student brag tags and an end-of-year celebration.

          This week I ran a report that informs my students their total reading points for each Principal’s Challenge.  I gave each student their personal slip in order to reflect on their reading motivation throughout the year.  Here is a picture of what this report looks like:

          Next, I used this free website  https://nces.ed.gov/nceskids/createagraph/  to generate a blank graph template for students to chart their data and to set a goal for the remaining Principal’s Challenge (challenge #6).  Finally, they had to write a statement about why they chose this goal.  I made sure to make no judgments about whether their goal was too low or too high.  I left it to their discretion and overall the majority selected goals that were reasonable.  Here is an example:

          It was interesting to me that this particular student wrote: “I want this goal (30 points) because I want to get more points than any principal’s challenge points I ever had.”  It warms my heart when I read these introspective conclusions that students come to and it also motivates me to continually find other ways to facilitate goal-setting.  Of course, students take these home in order to share with their parents how they plan to keep improving their reading habits.

Student reflections will undoubtedly lead to teacher reflection.

          After I read through each reflection and goal-setting analysis, I thought about how I could help students become more voracious readers and whether goal-setting more often can help in this endeavor.  I did observe an overall trend of point decline especially after the third Principal’s Challenge.  This challenge comes right after the Winter Break and I am assuming students return from break still holding onto a “vacation” mentality especially when it comes to reading.  I am thinking of ways to  incentivize  next year’s students after this break perhaps setting goals right away after the break and more frequent progress monitoring such as reading log check-ins or offering a teacher-student lunch bunch for those students who take weekly quizzes.   

          I hope you have enjoyed these morsels of information and a small “peek” into my classroom regarding student conferencing.  May you enjoy your summer vacation and we will see you next school year!

Learning and growing along with my students!

Gus Macuil

Conferencing with Students = Communicating with Parents (part 2)

Conferencing With Students =

Communicating with Parents (part 2)

     What is more exciting than conferencing with a struggling reader or perhaps an English Learner and witnessing their continuous effort to become fluent readers?!  In this month’s post, I want to continue talking about how to conference with students using authentic and meaningful data in order for them to articulate this data with their parents!  

Conferencing with students should be meaningful for both teacher and student.  It is an important opportunity to create, strengthen and continue the teacher-student bond that can last for years to come!

I have made an extra effort to use the technology that our district provides such as Renaissance Learning products (Accelerated Reader) in order to meet with students about their reading habits/progress as well as convert these into an opportunity to communicate with their parents.  AR offers lots of reports and I would like to share how I use the word count report with students.  At our school, our Principal has created a “challenge” to all students.  Each grade is challenged to gain a certain amount of AR points within a six-week period.  If students achieve these points, they receive an extra recess as well as a brag tag.  The brag tags have been a great incentive this year as most students really want to collect all six Principal’s Challenge tags for the year!

Each time a student passes an AR quiz, the program adds the total word count of that particular book into the student’s record.  AR allows teachers to run reports within certain time periods to report a particular word count for that time period.  What I like to do is use an informational chart that our principal provided us a few months ago about the impact that reading has on academics.  I decided to create a worksheet (embedding this chart) in order to allow my students to reflect on how they did during the principal’s challenge and what this tells them about their reading habits.  In the video below, you can see how I conferenced with one particular student to help her reflect on her reading.  I also encouraged her to make personal goals for the next challenge.  In the end, she made certain that she would be able to share this information with her mom at home. 

Items to remember during student conferencing:

1.   Keep it simple - try to make data “kid-friendly” but don’t be afraid to use academic vocabulary when reviewing reports.  Kids get it!

2.           Keep it positive - students tend to gravitate towards the “mistakes” so become their cheerleader and their coach by celebrating their progress.

3.           Keep it brief- remember that you have a lot of students and not enough time.  Allocate just a few minutes for each conference...I usually try to keep them under 10 minutes...less is more!  

4.           Keep it reflective - it is more important to me my students understand HOW they learn instead of what they’ve learned.   Questions I try to use over and over: What does this tell you about yourself as a learner?  What goals can you set? Why?

5.           DON’T keep it to yourself - have students share their data home to share with parents.  Parents often mention to me how impressed they are to hear their child articulate details about their performance or progress.  It is exciting to receive this feedback during parent conferences or unexpected emails.

Learning and growing along with my students!

Gus Macuil

Conferencing with Students = Communicating to Parents

Conferencing With Students =

Communicating to Parents

Do you want more “bang for your buck” when you conference with your students?  How can you use a student conference - say about their most recent reading scores - and turn it into a parent communication opportunity especially for those hard-to-reach parents?  Well...read on! 

Every time you conference with your student about their academic gains - you are empowering them! When you teach them how to communicate those results to their parents, you are empowering everyone!

I have made it a personal goal this year to conference with every one of my students as often as possible.  With a class of 32 fourth graders, this is sometimes easier said than done!  However, by focusing on the most important conferencing moments, I have also learned to convert these into a parent communication opportunity.  Personally, I like to use the Renaissance Learning STAR report to conference with my students.

Highlights of STAR diagnostic and annual progress reports:

• ·         It generates a student trend line showing growth.
• ·         It places their results within 25th, 50th, and 75th percentile.
• ·         It identifies their grade equivalency in regards to reading (reading level).
• ·         It provides a ZPD range allowing students the ability to self-select books that they can read independently when they visit the library.

Please keep in mind that I do not cover all the data on the reports, I like to highlight the items that I feel my students would enjoy sharing with their parents when they take their reports home.  I also do not conference with every single student each time they take the STAR report.  Since they have gotten used to taking the STAR each month, this allows me to only conference with about 10 to 11 students each month. What about my struggling students whose trend line is pointing south?  In order to not feel too discouraged, I usually run an alternative report such as their Reading Inventory or a monthly report of their AR book selections especially if they have been successfully passing books they have read.  Remember that the goal is twofold: empower your student with positive data and connect with parents. 

What does this look like?  What are the results?

The following video shows an example of how I approach conferencing.

The results:

·         Accelerated Reader trophy (class with most AR points) has been won twice this year by our class despite strong competition from sixth-grade classes!

·         Reading Inventory results: 68% reading increase from Oct. to Feb.

·         18 students scored proficient (up 7 students from previous RI); 8 students scored basic (3 less than previous RI); and 4 scored below basic (3 less than previous RI).

·         28 out of 31 students made most recent Principal’s Challenge (6-week incentive program for AR points)

·         Parents stay informed on a monthly basis.  Students take report home, parents sign somewhere on the report as having received it and I check it off my parent tracker sheet.  Students return report home to keep.

Learning and growing along with my students!

Gus Macuil