Parent-School Relationships: Presume Baggage… and Carry On! – Part 4
Over the course of this series, we've explored two guiding principles: Presume Baggage and Presume Carry On. We’ve also looked at the phrases that quietly undermine them, and how there’s little to no training on how parent-teacher conversations should work in the first place. If you're joining us here, it's worth starting at Part 1.
In this final installment, to quote DJ Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince, we will discuss that “Parents just don’t understand.”
What Parents May Not Know
It's not that parents don't care, it's that no one has ever shown them behind the curtain. Most have never had reason to think about things like:
- how many students are in the classroom, how many students a teacher has to give grades to, or how many students are on a specialist teacher’s caseload
- everything a teacher needs to document
- the average number of emails arriving in an educator’s inbox per day
- the frequency of disruptions to a teacher’s “regular schedule” by special events including assemblies, fire drills, celebrations, school trips, parent meetings, department meetings, meetings with school leadership, etc.
- how often teachers skip or rush their lunch
- how often teachers feel compelled to put off going to the bathroom for hours
- the variety of students a teacher is trying to support equitably in a single class, among whom the parent’s child is one of many
- how soon after meeting with a parent, a teacher needs to be somewhere else
- how the teacher’s day has been prior to the meeting, and what lies ahead
- the anxiety that certain words and tones may cause a teacher, as teachers also carry the baggage of what they have previously experienced
- the reality that there are professional time and energy limits on how much hands-on support a teacher can provide to any one child
- how much time outside of school hours is spent on planning and grading
- the many other tasks educators carry, like morning duty, a student club at lunch, or a parent meeting during what would have been their only planning period of the day
And for all this and more, because there is no modeling or training for parents on effective parent-school relationships, most parents will not think about most of these things.
From the Parents' Side
A parent who begins a meeting with a list of complaints, anger, high emotion, indifference, or in any less than pleasant way, is not considering that they could be doing something detrimental to a relationship.
In both public and private schools, parents view teachers, indirectly or directly, as people who are employed by them to instruct their children. And no one has suggested otherwise. No one has defined the terms of the relationship.
Educators should not expect parents to be cognizant of how school and parent-school relationships optimally work without teaching parents on this topic.
Consider This
We speak to the whole community about safeguarding. We bring the whole community together for international days, concerts, performances, and sporting events. Yet schools are unlikely to bring the whole community together on how parents and educators communicate.
If we want a model where parents and educators talk with each other instead of at each other, there needs to be frameworks, modeling, expectations and education on what works well.
If it would be advantageous for parents to understand some of the things listed above, these should be positively addressed in community conversations.
Without training parents on how hard education staff work, teachers are put in a situation where they may feel compelled to be either (a) “professional” and act like they have infinite availability for each child and family, or (b) “unprofessional” because they are speaking with parents who have no contextual understanding.
None of this is about assigning blame. Parents carry baggage. Educators carry baggage. And both walk into these conversations without a map. We hope this series has offered a few easy-to-follow directions. If you'd like help constructing PD² — professional development and parent development — for your school community, we'd love to work with you.
