Communication

Communication
Administrators want teachers to communicate with all parent/guardians on the phone twice a month. Two 5 minute conversation with 200 parent/guardians is 1000 minutes (16.66 hr). Conversations normally go longer. You will also face parent/guardians who cannot communicate in English. I do employ phone calls to parent/guardians to cite students to be praised as well as those that are having difficulty.

Unfortunately, my school system considered newsletters or handouts to parents to be at a Needs Improvement for teachers and NOT two way communication.


 * I have provided desktop published summaries to parent/guardians that are mounted in their child's Science Journal.
 * Includes references to student's graded assignments and mini-quizzes also found in Science Journal.
 * This makes it easy for the parent/guardians to review what has been done and sign the summary after viewing their child's Science Journal.
 * Everything is together with no loose pages to be lost by the student.
 * **For language limited parent/guardians, I use [|Google Translate] to translate the summaries to the required languages. The syntax and grammar are not perfect but it is better than just in English.**

I am now looking into Student Information Systems (SIS). They allow email correspondence with parents and allow for batch sending of newsletters and handouts to an entire class of parents and students. Parents can with a click respond to your email if they feel so inclined. They are open portal in that parents can look up their student's scores for various classroom activities and assignments. My schools SIS system is bulky and difficult to use. Parent access to their child's grades requires special access letters to be printed in the office and sent home to each parent. I have been informed that some parents are unable to make the access letter work. I feel this is a difficulty due to the system we use and not on the part of the parents. Software is suppose to meet the needs of the user and not the user the needs of the software. There are better SIS freeware options and those at small cost per year that would be a better fit. Since my fellow elementary teachers do not post scores on SIS, I am currently reviewing personal SIS options to use for Science communication with parents.

I have had some students "lose" their Science Journals to hide their low performance. If it is truly lost, I give them another blank journal to be completed to the level of the Class Science Journal. This can only be done during the student's recess since the student cannot take the Class Science Journal home. If more than one student needs to use the Class Science Journal, I make photocopies for them to use but not keep. This motivates students to not lose their Science Journal.