The Worthy Educator: Connecting with Students’ Parents
January 7, 2025
This month, Tom contributed an article to Legacy, the official journal of The Worthy Educator. Read the introduction below and then click through to the full article.
While time brings change, there are still some constants: educators are passionate people and education is always rife with conflicts. Today there are rancorous discussions about phonics and how to teach reading, questions about grading policies and the fairness of giving students a score of zero, and intense debates about charters versus public schools. Educators, it seems, can only agree to disagree. But one area about which there is universal unanimity is that parent involvement is a positive. Simply put, students do better when parents are engaged in their education. Of course!
Yet despite this strong consensus, our profession does not do a good job of preparing and supporting teachers to work with their students’ parents. Reflect back on your educational preparation, please: I’m sure that your undergraduate coursework gave little, if any focus, on this topic. You spent hundreds – maybe thousands – of hours observing in classrooms and student teaching, but it’s highly unlikely that you experienced training on how to conduct a parent-teacher conference or received feedback on your interactions with students’ parents. But you’re not alone!
Oddly, despite the fact that we know that students perform better when parents are involved and informed, little emphasis given to this topic in teacher education. Perhaps even more oddly, all too often not much time is spent on this topic in professional development. These are missed opportunities.