As the year is progressing I find my motto of being stress free is becoming harder and harder to adhere to. One thing that is making my motto difficult is the communication piece of my classroom. I feel most of my day is spent returning emails, making phone calls or having one-on-one meetings before or after school and typing newsletters.
I have tried to set specific times in my day to return phone calls and have started making more phone calls instead of emails because I feel it is faster to just call. This worked until I spent over an hour after school one day emailing and returning calls and I couldn’t do anything afterwards because I was mentally drained.
I have also tried to break up that time slot. I try and limit phone calling and emailing to 20 minutes, 3 times a day. This has seemed to work. I have managed my time more by dispersing it throughout my day. But then I began to think… that is A LOT of time to be communicating with parents every day. I feel communication is the key to successful classroom management, but when does it become overbearing and interfere with teaching? I encourage all of my parents to be as active as they can in their child’s education, but when does all the parent communication become too much?
There have been many studies on the importance of parent involvement and how it links to student success. The National Center for Student Engagement has an interesting article on the barriers of parental involvement. The list of barriers is a great tool to use in your classroom to evaluate why some parents may not be as involved as you would like. Joyce Epstein has also included a framework for parental involvement. Communication on a regular, two-way basis is number 2 on the list.
Another article I found very informational is an article from the Child Trends DataBank. It states children who have parental involvement are less likely to have behavior problems, have better academic performance and are more likely to complete secondary school. Although it does state the differences in success in areas such as grade level, ethnicity, parental education, poverty level, and parent language.
How do I successfully involve my parents but yet manage to complete everything else in my classroom in a timely fashion? How do I get those few parents involved whose child needs their involvement the most? What do I say to the parent who wants daily updates and won’t take “I’ll try my hardest” as an answer? Is this a problem I should take with a grain of salt and be happy I have parents who are so concerned? Or is this a problem that needs to be addressed and fixed soon?
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Jenna,
ReplyDeleteYou read my mind with this blog. I feel like half of my day is consumed with answering emails, calling parents, making progress reports and having conferences. I am lucky that our grade books are now online so that has cut down some of the madness, but by no means all of madness. I like you have decided to only return emails, phone calls and fill request at certain times during the day. Our school system use to have a instant messenger that teachers allowed teachers to talk between classrooms, but it has since been removed because a few teachers abused the system. Dealing with my parents has become easier since I created a www.schoolnotes.com account. I put all assignments and vocabulary words on the site so that parents see everything we are doing a week ahead of time. This has drastically cut down parent calls and emails. When I update the site it sends an email to all the parents letting them know I have updated the information. Maybe you could try that site or a similar one.
Good luck finding a solution,
Blaire
Jenna,
ReplyDeleteLike Blaire I have to say that you read my mind as well. I probably average about five parent phone calls per day and each call can take up to ten minutes. I also get a couple of parent emails every day but what I find myself spending a lot of time on is emails to administration and staff. Like your title indicates, when is it enough? You are right to cite the studies that show parental involvement having nothing but a positive impact in the education of students; in fact, I have not seen one study that would indicate otherwise. In both our cases we are in need of a better system or need to be better multi-taskers and I think I have the solution. Have you ever heard of moodle? www.moodle.org. It is a free site that gives you the tools to create your own class website (quite easily might I add) where you can put your daily lesson plans up and general class information. I think that if you kept one of these sites going with daily updates that you would decrease your parent contacts by half. Unfortunately I think that we have to spend a lot of time on the phone and emailing parents and while it may be frustrating at times I think it is for the greater good =D
Cheers,
ct
I was once asked if I could have more of anything what would it be. I easily answered time. The class website is a great tool and I am working to expand my informational site to include assignments. Another idea I would suggest is communicating through student agendas. My school gives each student an agenda book at the start of school. Teachers can write notes to parents and parents can respond in the agenda. Of course this only works if the parent sees the agenda, but it is a first step in eliminating telephone tag. I have also come up with a way to deal with the daily email updates. I could never remember to email the parent until I asked them to email me each day before 2 pm. I explained with the number of duties I have I would be more able to grant the request if I could simply hit the reply button. Parents understood and shared the reponsibility. I found that most parents didn't actually need a daily update but might email a couple times a week.
ReplyDeleteA personal note on the stress; one thing at a time- you are doing a good job- and remember to breathe.
I have the same problem keeping up with all the parent communications. For my job, I see my students’ parents daily. They have to come into the school and sign their children out. The problem I have is, the parents can come at anytime and then completely disrupt our activity. I could be right in the middle of a story, and a parent will want to pull me aside to have a little conversation. I do appreciate the parents wanting to communicate with me, however sometimes it is inconvenient. I have build some great friendship since some of the kids have been with me for over four years. I do send out a Friday news note to keep parents up to date on the activities we are doing after school. I am even attempting a blog! To help do the news note quickly, I keep the same layout template so I do not have to open a new one each week. This saves me time. Also for e-mails, I have made folders that I put the e-mails that need answered but I do not necessary have a minute to do it when I read it. This way, the e-mail does not get lost with all the other e-mails I get daily.
ReplyDeleteI also have a difficult time keeping up with my parent communication logs. For some of my students I have a daily communication with their parents. I do not get much feed back from my parents, and at first I did not know if they even read the log until I had them initial it. I still can not be sure that they have read it, but if they are going to take the time to put their initial there, I'm assuming that they did. I have told my parents that if they need to get a hold of me to do it by e-mail and I will get back to them faster than by phone. I have found myself doing a working lunch in my room answer e-mails from parents and other teachers and in between classes (our students get 4 minutes to pass between, it is amazing how many e-mails you can get out in 4 minutes). This is really the only time I can use to do this without giving up my prep time to prepare for my classes or getting my paperwork done. I would love to have more time but there never seems to be any.
ReplyDelete