Ways to Keep in Touch with parents

If you are a tech savvy teacher (or you pretend to be) there are a lot of ways to connect with parents:

Remind101 is a service designed with teachers in mind. It essentially lets parents sign up for their student's class. From them on when you want to send a reminder, "Students will be reading at a nearby preschool next week! See if your child wants to practice their book with you."
Pros-
It's free! No need to wait for your tax refund.
It respects privacy: your number is never shown to any parents and their numbers aren't revealed to you.
It's easy! It walks you through step by step.

Cons-
It is only available in the US and Canada... so that leaves me out of this loop.

If you use a site to record grades, or monitor behavior (Engrade, ClassDojo, Blackboard) they usually have a way for parents to log in and access the site.

Sometimes this is more passive on your part. You keep the information up to date and they make the decision to check it or not. That's what something like Engrade and blackboard offer.

 ClassDojo is also passive, however it also lets you send your reports to the parents. For example, if you are reacting to a particularly good day with a trouble student you can send the report to a parent so they can praise their child as well!


These programs are great because if you are already using them, it doesn't require much more effort to allow the parents access. It also makes your class a lot more visible. Students can't claim they don't know why they are failing, or that the teacher doesn't like  them. Their actions and grades are all very transparent.

You can create a class website, blog or twitter too! These take a bit more effort as you have to maintain them, but I find they are great for students who lose papers or need reminders. I love using Twitter. It is fast, easy and most of my students are addicted so it works well.

It is also nice for those less tech savvy teachers because it really doesn't require that much know-how to make a twitter account and get started.


No computer access?
If you simply cannot access technology (or you don't think your students' parents can) you can still connect with your students' parents in others ways:

I have talked about how I send a letter home the first week; this way, parents know what I expect and how to reach me.

My mother always sent out a monthly (or was it weekly) newsletter to her students.

My school had a weekly "Family Envelope" with reminders of school events, class assignments and other must know things. Parents would sign whatever was inside the envelope and return it to the school with the student. Sometimes they includes little "password questions" randomly. If a parent spotted it, they would answer the question and send in the answer. This would put their student in a drawing for free homework passes, free dress days, etc.

What about you? How do you keep in touch with parents? Does it work? What would your ideal system be? I'd love to hear form you in the comments, or on Twitter.

Book Review: Dangerous Lies We Tell to Children and Ourselves

Since this week I talked about parent interaction I wanted to include a review of a book that involved parents. 

I think my parents did a pretty amazing job, and I can really only remember one big lie they told me. I was a HUGE cry baby when I was younger. Skinned knees: I’d cry. Hurt feelings: I’d really cry. Broken toy: sobbing. Lost toy: mental breakdown. One day I went running to my mom in the backyard over some trivial ailment tears streaming down my face and she said, “Carissa, God only gives you so many tears, and if you waste them all now when I die you won’t be able to cry at my funeral.” It worked. I could almost feel the tears get sucked back into my tear ducts.

Did that lie affect me growing up? Maybe, but I don’t think so. I still cried when I was sad (or very happy). I still cry like a baby during those animal abuse commercials. It didn’t emotionally stunt me. It was just something she said to get me to reevaluate my personal preference towards constantly crying over everything. I don’t think my parents ever told me any dangerous lies, but maybe yours did?

Title: Dangerous Lies We Tell to Children and Ourselves Author: Deborah Dian  

Pages: 77 Price: $.99

Who would buy it? I think this book is directed at parents more than teachers, but as the author was an educator and teachers are often like parents I picked it up. That was a mistake. I don’t see much use for this book for a teacher, unless they have told one of the four lies mentioned below.

What does it do?  

The book covers nine lies that parents tell children, then four lies that teachers tell their students and finally six lies that parents tell themselves. The books rounds off with an epilogue and sources.

Essentially the book starts by stating that while adults are used to exaggeration and white lies children tend to accept everything at face value. This means that when a child is lied to they become hurt, frustrated, and less believing that everything is truthful.

The nine lies from parents are ones that I have difficulty relating to because my parents never said them. An example is, “You’re too young to know what that word means,” and “Don’t worry about money everything is fine.” Each lie goes through examples of when parents tell the lie, why they tell the lie, why the lie is so dangerous and what alternatives there are (e.g. how to tell the truth). 

Next we are given a look at some lies that teachers tell students. These are: “school is a safe place”; “only an idiot would vote for that guy”; “every student should take college prep classes”; and “a degree is the only way to be successful.” I can honestly say I’ve never told those lies, nor have I ever had a teacher tell them to me. I did have a very liberal government teacher in high school who dressed in black when someone was given the death penalty and often told us how amazing Michael Moore was, but she never told us she disliked George Bush.  If you have said something similar to those four lies, then you may like to get this book and check out some of the alternatives.

It ends with the six dangerous lies parents tell themselves. I have a splendid cat, but no children, so I basically skimmed this section. One example is, “”My teens are too young to be given adult information about sex”

Is it any good? 

Mostly I was not a fan of the book. Though, at one point, she pointed out the misguided results of teachers always telling students they can do anything. Yes, bolstering a student’s self-esteem is good, but platitudes such as, “work hard and you can be whatever you want,” are often just that…empty platitudes. Students then become embarrassed or feel inadequate when they are working a minimum wage out of high school. They were told they would have greatness…where is that?

In Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk wrote “We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off." I think this was a similar observation on her part.

Otherwise, I think I expected to relate more with this book, and when I couldn’t. I was disappointed. However, if you can remember being lied to as a child, or if any of the lies mentioned above that teachers tell have been things you’ve said then I think you would enjoy this book much more than I did,

Maintaining Contact with Parents

For the life of me I can't remember where I heard this story. It could have been from a colleague, a friend, a teacher, or a blog. Essentially the story goes:

A parent came in to complain about her child's grades and how the school needed to be doing more.  The employee looked at her and said, "Name three of your child's teachers." The parent paused nodded her head and said, "I see your point, have a nice day."

The moral of the story is that parents tend to only get involved when things go bad, when they would be more useful getting involved from the start!

On the first day of class we do several things. I have a PowerPoint where I go over class expectations and rules. Then they fill out a gap fill restating the rules. The final part is to take the paper home to their parents. The bottom of the paper is a short letter (in Spanish) to the parents. It explains that they can access engrade, or twitter to get a hold of me in addition to my e-mail. I also offer to speak with them in Spanish if they don't feel comfortable in English.

This way, right away I have opened up the channels of communication. Not all parents choose to contact me, but I know that I gave them the option to get involved from day one.

This year when I sent out the letter I received an e-mail that very night from a mother sent from her iPhone. It was written in Spanish, but the loosely translated it said, "Hello. It is very nice on your part to introduce yourself, and it is very nice to meet you. I am the mother of (student). This is the first time that a teacher has shown this kindness. I wish you the best."


I know it is silly, but notes like that really make me feel like I am on the right track.

There are some more suggestions here. How do you make sure that your parents stay up to date with your class?