Educators value the involvement and support of parents, guardians, families and communities in schools.
To build a well-rounded relationship with students, I believe that parent/guardian involvement is key, and his practicum parent/guardian involvement was a goal of mine in order to help build relationships with my students. As a teacher I spend 6 hours a day with my students, but they start and end every day with their families and by having that relationship and communication with parents/guardians has helped me learn more and understand my students on a stronger level.
To help reach my goal of having a teacher-parent relationship and involvement the first thing I did in my first week of school was send out a letter to the parents/guardians of my students introducing myself, stating how I would be integrating into the class, some facts about myself as well as my email contact information if anyone had any questions they wanted to ask me. My second step was to attend all the parent-teacher-student conferences. This allowed for me to meet the parents/ guardians of my students face to face and be able to share positive interactions and goals that the student and I have had so far while I have been in the class teaching.
After both of those interactions, it allowed for me to make sure that parents/ guardians had an open line of communication with myself, whether that was directly though me or with the support of my CT. This also made it possible for me to be able to contact them when needed. If a student was to miss school or an occurrence during the day happened, there were now open lines of communication to get home homework, or let the parents know how the situations at school was handled and if they had any suggestions on how to solve reoccurrence from happening. An example was when one of my students behaved in an unsafe manner at school and had to then had to be sent to the office. Even though the situation was handled at the school, the parents still needed to be aware of what happened and the outcome from the situation. I then emailed the parents about what had happened and how the student and I had discussed the occurrence and how we were going to work together to make sure that the situation never happened again. Having that relationship with the parents though made it possible for me to reach out to them and have that conversation about their child without it being uncomfortable or coming from someone that they do not know the relationship that they have with their child.
*Note: the feature picture is a sample of my introduction letter to parents. Short and simple to get my message and contact information across! 🙂