Private School Communication: What’s the Best Way to Reach Parents?
Sara Terrell
Without the participation and support of their teachers and parents, students may struggle to achieve academic success. However, it’s impossible to build strong teacher-parent relationships in which everyone benefits without clear, open, and regular communication.
The question is, what’s the best way for you as a teacher to connect with caregivers?
Benefits of Effective Teacher-Parent Communication
A U.S Department of Education study found that students whose teachers communicate with their parents are more likely to stay in school, develop positive behaviors and attitudes, feel cared for and secure, and work to realize their potential.
Parents also benefit from open communication with teachers. One of the biggest benefits is that they can better recognize the importance of their role through receiving regular updates on their children’s accomplishments, curriculum, and supportive strategies for learning or studying at home.
As a teacher, you benefit from regular, effective communication with your students’ parents, too. In addition to potentially seeing students achieve better grades and higher homework completion rates due to greater parental involvement and interest at home, you’re likely to see their parents become more cooperative, leading to greater involvement in the life of the school.
The best way to reach parents impactfully and in a way that allows them to express their thoughts and feelings is through parent-teacher conferences and face-to-face meetings. However, as this isn’t always practical, you can take advantage of various tools designed for one- or two-way communication, depending on your needs.
One-Way Teacher-Parent Communication Tools
One-way communication is when information flows in one direction only, rather than allowing for feedback. This is appropriate when you want to provide parents with general class news that doesn’t require a response, such as class highlights in an end-of-semester newsletter. A couple of the best tools for doing this include:
Webpages
A class webpage is a great way to create an information hub that parents can access at their convenience, and Gradelink makes it easy to achieve this. Gradelink includes School News and Teacher Pages, allowing your school to create a general news page and teachers to create customizable pages for every class they teach.
As these pages are built into the student information system, the process of customizing them is much easier than if you were trying to build a full webpage from scratch. Parents can view your page by logging into Gradelink or, if your page is embedded, by accessing the school website.
On your teacher pages, you can include the name of the class or course, your photo, a brief biography of yourself, and your contact details. This gives parents a better idea of who you are and how to reach you. Additionally, you can post current class news, information about daily school life, homework assignments, and support. It’s a good idea to publish field trip information, tips for parents, and links to printables, educational games, and other resources for parents and students, too.
A class webpage is also a great platform for uploading various forms required for school, such as permission slips or indemnity forms for field trips. This keeps everyone on the same page and provides parents with resources they can use to better support their children’s educational experience.
Newsletters
A newsletter is a simple, consistent way to share a range of information with your students’ parents. While you can follow the old-fashioned route of printing newsletters and sending these hard copies home, there’s no guarantee parents will receive them.
A better option is to create a digital newsletter for communicating class announcements and calendars, policies, classroom practices, homework help, learning strategies, and resources and tips for parents.
For effective communication via newsletters, ensure they meet the following criteria:
- Professionalism: Make sure your newsletters are clear, paying attention to formatting, grammar, and spelling.
- Be Brief: Keep your newsletters to one page by including only key points.
- Remember Diversity: Use conversational, simple, and warm language, as well as words and graphics that reflect the diversity of your classroom.
- Be Interesting: Create interest by using clever titles and fun infographics that break down complex information into quick and easy-to-understand visual formats.
Two-Way Teacher-Parent Communication Tools
One-way communication tools are fine for general communications that don’t necessarily require a response. However, these aren’t suitable for communication of a more personal nature, such as student behavior and grades, health issues, social concerns, and scheduling. The best methods for encouraging and enabling two-way communication between teachers and parents include:
Efficient, fast, and personalized, email is an excellent choice for communicating with your students’ parents. Emails allow parents to think of a considered response and reply when it’s most convenient for them to do so.
That said, there are two important considerations if you use email as a two-way communication tool. These are email account security, which needs to be stringent and strong, and stating your thoughts and feelings clearly while regulating the tone of your emails to avoid miscommunication.
The following tips can help you make the most of email as a means of communicating with parents:
- Create an email policy and communicate it to parents.
- Use a school email address.
- Ensure your emails have a clear subject line.
- Keep emails factual, friendly, short, and easy to read.
- Consider the tone and check grammar and spelling before sending.
- Advise parents of expected response timeframes.
- Make sure your emails have a balance of positive and negative information, with the positive information included before the negative.
Advanced communication: Get text and voice messaging for your school
Student Information Systems or Apps
While websites, newsletters, and personalized emails are effective ways of reaching students’ parents, these can be time-consuming. Student information systems and apps such as Gradelink provide a one-stop platform for fast, effective communication and allow parents to access information about their children’s school experience.
You can use a student information system or app to send instant messages, emails, or voice messages to parents. For example, Gradelink allows you to share school and class-specific calendars, discipline alerts, and school announcements and alerts regarding class activities, class and assignment grades, attendance, homework, and reminders.
Apart from the comprehensive features, one of the best reasons to use a student information system is that you can either communicate with all your students’ parents or you can communicate with the parents of individual students. Additionally, while some systems are designed with one-way communication in mind, others facilitate two-way communication, allowing you to receive responses from parents via the system.
Communicate Effectively and Equitably with Parents
Regardless of the communication methods you choose, it’s vital that you plan ahead to ensure you communicate clearly and effectively with your students’ parents. It’s also essential that your school communication is equitable and inclusive, especially with schools becoming more diverse. This means taking into account your students’ parents’ home language, whether they have a mobile phone or a landline, whether they have internet access at home, and the parents’ availability.
With these considerations, suggestions, and tips to guide you, you can make contact with parents consistently and keep them engaged and involved for the benefit of all concerned.
Sara Terrell is a versatile writer covering topics from education to business.