I firmly believe that one of the biggest contributors to a teacher's success is how well you communicate with students and their parents.
Why?
You know the material. Your head is full of teaching strategies. But if you don't communicate well, you are sunk. With an updated website and updates via text and/or email, students & parents will:
Plus, administrators can easily point to your work for reviews and in parent conferences.
- Know when projects are due & tests/quizzes are scheduled
- Find what to do if they are absent
- Understand that the responsibility is on them, as you've made expectations clear
- Appreciate that you take the time to keep them in the loop
Plus, administrators can easily point to your work for reviews and in parent conferences.
How to Do It
- Make a website and KEEP IT UPDATED! This is probably the most important one. Post your notes (many IEPs request this anyway), include a calendar, and links to valuable resources. Here's mine: http://loudounvision.net/course/view.php?id=3488 [choose Login as a guest and agree to the policy to view it]. As a plus, once you've made it, your site be there next year so you only need create it once. Edmodo, Gooru or Blackboard are also good choices if your school district supports them.
- Sign up for Remind to send text updates
- Collect email addresses (students & parents) & create groups to send emails easily to the entire class
- Send daily (or weekly) updates via text or email
- Ask for input! Make a poll on GoogleForms or SurveyMonkey and gather student opinion on seating charts, project ideas, or whatever new technique you want to try. Include the link on your website or text/email updates. You get the input, they feel like you are listening. Win win!
- Answer emails within 24 hours. On weekends & holidays, plan one or two times to check your emails for emergencies. Corollary to this, DON'T respond when you are upset! Wait a few more hours or until someone else can look it over before responding to a testy comment. Sometimes people just want to vent, so it's occasionally best not to respond at all.
- Make vocabulary lists on Quizlet to fit your units. If you include links to them on your website, in emails & texts, students can access & work with them any time. Especially good for students with reading difficulties, test anxiety or English language learners.
- Match your communication tools with your students. At my current school, nearly every student has a smartphone, even if they don't have a computer at home. So anything I send needs to be mobile-friendly. But this is a change - a few years ago, all I needed was email. I then started getting complaints from parents that their children weren't reading emails, so I added Remind text updates. My students still use both email & text, and there are some who have no email or phone & can only get info in class or by using a school computer to access my website. So, I need to update text, email & web to reach everyone. I'll keep polling my students - perhaps in a couple years I can dump one and add the newest tool. You'll have to ask your own students what methods they prefer.