Important adults need to hear the good, too.
The artifact.
On turn-over day, I sent out an email to introduce myself to parents/guardians for the first time and notify them of the week’s schedule.
At the end of the week, I sent the email below to give a bit more detail about the first few units of the course (with learning goals), and I also gave parents a suggestion about how to get involved in their student’s learning (reading/giving feedback on their genre project).
After sending out this email, I reflected on individual students whose behaviour had been particularly encouraging to me in my first week as a student teacher. One student had impressed me with her initiative to ask for help in the writing process. Others had simply shown extraordinary attentiveness, active listening skills, and kindness towards me and their classmates. Based on these few students, I sent out a few emails similar to the ones shown below:
Parens responded very positively. Over the course of the weekend, the following responses entered my email Inbox:
Why it matters.
Corresponding regularly with parents is a valuable way to spend my time, especially during my student teaching. In the quarter system under COVID-19 circumstances, it can be challenging to always know how students are doing, and it is extremely difficult to give a class of 30 students enough feedback to continuously work on (that would take too long!). This is why parent/guardian and community involvement is so important. Without the added feedback, support, and encouragement of parents at home, students would not be developing their English language skills as well. Furthermore, I know that developing relationships with parents is crucial to ensuring the blended portion of the English 9 course will run more smoothly when we switch to online in a few weeks.
Telling parents/guardians about the good behaviour of my students is something I hold in very high regard. Most important adults only hear from teachers when something challenging or “negative” comes up about a student. My goal is to also communicate about what students are doing well — more specifically, work habits and social skills that they are developing that do not go unseen in the classroom. After all, the goal of schooling is ultimately to develop Core Competencies of respect, self-awareness, initiative, and other similar abilities — and I hope that by positively reinforcing these behaviours, my students will grow in their intrinsic motivation to live as motivated, respectful, and creative individuals.
My hope is that by establishing close and trusting relationships with guardians, I am more likely to find out about challenging situations/incidents in my students’ lives that would affect their work at school. To establish a safe classroom environment, I need my students to know that I care about their physical, emotional, and mental wellbeing outside the classroom as well.
Being in regular contact with parents seems like one of the more daunting parts of the teaching profession. But this week, I felt the positive effects of simply connecting with guardians for the sake of my students. After all, this communication is not to “impress” parents — but really, it’s about establishing a relationship so that students have the best support they can get, both during and after school.
Next steps.
I’d like to set a goal for myself to send out regular emails to parents. Informative emails that focus on units and activities (including learning targets) will be sent out at the beginning of every new unit. Furthermore, when we switch to online learning, I’m sure my correspondence with parents will be much more frequent. I hope to send out weekly reminders of assignments and learning targets so parents are in the loop and can actively support their students as they do school from home.
In terms of positive reinforcement, I am setting a goal to send out at least 1 positive email a week about student behaviour. During my first week of this quarter, I focused on several students whose positive behaviour stood out to me right away, but in future weeks I will choose other names on my attendance list to write home about. By the end of the course, my hope is that each of my students will have had at least one positive email home about how they are behaving in my class.
Professional Standard #1: Educators value the success of all students. Educators care for students and act in their best interests.
Professional Stardard #4: Educators value the involvement and support of parents, guardians, families and communities in schools.