Technology can reduce Trust deficit between Teachers and Parents?
Fifth grade students at this particular school switched from their homeroom for math and science. The students knew they were to bring their own pencil and book to class. This was part of the teacher’s goal in teaching responsibility. One girl constantly forgot her pencil. The teacher gave her several warnings to bring her own pencil to class before sending a note home to the parents.
Upon receiving the note, the mother followed her child into class the next morning, bringing with her a box of two hundred pencils. She slammed the box down on the teacher’s desk and stated, “Since you can’t afford to give my daughter a pencil, here is her supply for the rest of the year!”
As you can imagine, this conflict was only the beginning of a difficult relationship. Even worse, the child was sent this message by her mother, “I’m on your side, the teacher is wrong and you don’t have to be responsible.”
It may not take a village to raise a child anymore, but parents and teachers certainly continue to play a vital role in the growth of the child. Parents and teachers' groups were largely disjoint with brief overlaps coinciding with "PTA" meetings where a five minute face-to-face was expected to exchange a semester-worth of information. With familial focus shifting from multi-children households to largely nuclear families with limited offspring, parents and teachers have come to expect more from their interactions with regard to their wards. Both sets of caregivers rightly believe now that teacher-parent communication fosters better understanding and collaboration between the classroom and home to make education a wholesome experience for the child. Indeed, research has shown that increased parent participation is a critical influence on student success.
Despite the known benefits of increasing parent participation in schooling, parent-teacher conferences can be stressful for teachers, especially in a competitive society that often breeds helicopter parenting and tiger parents. But beyond interpersonal strain that such meets can cause, the sheer volume of information that must be sorted and communicated can make such meets less than pleasant for the teacher. Through experience, teachers learn the best way to deal with the stressful experience and develop their own techniques to conduct smooth parent meetings that are productive and painless. Experience dictates that the teacher prepare in advance for the meet, provide both positive and negative feedback judiciously, listen not only to the spoken word, but also the implications of parents, and be pleasant.
With the inroads of technology into education, it is but logical that educators use technology to encourage meaningful parent participation and improve the experience for all concerned. Technology can enhance home-school communication in ways that alleviate communication challenges and barriers of time and distance that teachers and parents often face. There are many ways in which a teacher can use technology to improve the interaction, starting from scheduling to dissemination of student grade information, thus establishing avenues for parents to have a more meaningful role in education.