Communicating With Students and Families: Promising Practices

Strengthening your communication with students and families can seem daunting. How can you get started?

G. FAITH LITTLE
Initiative Director, 21st Century Learning

“The importance of good parent-teacher relationships has been well documented. Research has shown that parent involvement in education benefits not only the child but also the parents and teachers.”

— The Importance Of Teacher/Parent Partnerships

We want our students, parents, and teachers to experience these benefits.

Challenges are easy to list, and we likely have a long list beyond these, but here are some of the big ones. 
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• Time: how do I find it outside of parent/teacher conferences?
• Training: what do I do when the discussion goes beyond my content area?
• Expectation: the reasons I became a teacher didn’t include communicating with families, so how do I manage this in a way that’s aligned to my personality and content area?
• Planning: how do I begin to fit this in with my other teaching responsibilities?

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Start by planning

Strengthening your communication with students and families can start as simply as organizing your approach. Whether you’re approaching the beginning of the year, a new term, or are in the middle of a course, trying a new tool that can be customized to your unique communication style and your school’s expectations for family contact will support your work.

• Create a communication table (sample below) for each student. Update this electronically to save time when adding your notes, or print out the pages and keep them in a binder for easy access at your desk, especially if you prefer to write by hand. You can always scan in the documents later when you need to share your communication practices with leadership. Download our Family Connection template to get started.

 

• Establish a communication goal. Perhaps your school already has a certain number of contacts required for each student. If so, integrate those into the template. If not, consider for yourself what a reasonable goal would be, based on your unique situation and number of students.

 

• Choose a natural time you can merge a check of this document into your practice. Is it when you take attendance, or during the last few minutes of class? Is it every Friday afternoon or Monday morning? What’s the best time to integrate it into your schedule?

 

• Organize your chart in a way that makes sense for you. Do you need to make contact at least once a month? Do you need to make a specific type of contact (text, email, portal)? Shift your template to fit your needs.

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Communication goals

In the example below, our first goal was to start with listening, in this case using a baseline survey to the student’s parents that establishes a connection and supports us in understanding our student from the parent’s perspective. Our second goal was to have three positive contacts with the family, in addition to any contacts necessary to discuss issues that may arise in the classroom.

From here, we would continue to add our notes and check in on communication that may be needed in order to meet our goals. This template can continue to be streamlined or expanded as practices change over time.
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While the content of parent/teacher conversations may not always be easy, simply getting started can give you confidence and increase the ways in which you can connect with families.