NCTM website suggestions for communicating with parents were good. My favorite was contacting parents the first week of school so that the first communication is positive. I
wish I had tried to call all my parents the first week of school when I started
this year. I will start the next semester that way.
Knox County
already has the grade book online, which is great because parents can check it whenever and they don't have to wait for a report card. Also, my school sends report cards home every 3 weeks (instead of 4 and a half), and every report card day is actually a parent night, so parents can come to the school and talk to teachers if they want to.
I like e-mailing parents, but we aren't supposed to email, we are supposed to send everything through schoolfusion, which is a pain because then the parents need to register and sometimes they don't. Also, I was emailing with one parent and Outlook started blocking her email address so that I could no longer reply. I suppose Knox County on wants us to use our email for internal stuff.
I don't like the idea of post cards. Mail is expensive, and I personally hate junk mail, I feel like newsletters and such might fall into the same category.
When I was teaching middle school, I called parents, but it would take me several weeks to call all of them. I think I already mentioned this.
ReplyDeleteSo, the first call was positive and I used that to build on because sometimes I had to have difficult conversations with parents and that initial contact was helpful.
It was very telling to me that some parents I called seemed stunned to have a positive phone call or a call not bearing bad news of a students in the office or not behaving as he/she should.