Parent-Teacher Relationship

Teachers cannot know students as well as their parents can. Parents have a deep, holistic understanding of their kids. They understand what motivates them, what their strengths and weaknesses are, and how their children's personal lives may be impacting their academic performance.

Parental love is the greatest motivator. Teachers wish the best for their students, but parents will move heaven and earth to ensure their children are safe, happy and successful. As the program Head Start says, parents are their children's first and most important teacher.

Parents are always there. A teacher must divide their attention amongst dozens of students for six or seven hours a day. However, the voice of their parents is often the first and last thing that a child hears each day. Parents can remind their kids about upcoming tests, check their homework, and deal with problems before they manifest themselves in the classroom. 

Ways for teachers to communicate with parents
A generation ago, communications were limited to email and parent/teacher conferences. Today, there are scores of convenient and easy-to-use options for building positive relationships with parents. 
Here are several great relationship-building options:

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  Email. Tried and true, email is still a great way to communicate with parents because it's more than likely how they'll expect to hear from you. Being able to CC or BCC other teachers or administrators onto communication with parents is beneficial when multiple parties need to be kept in the loop about an issue.

  Another useful feature of email is that every exchange is automatically cataloged for future reference.

  
  
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  Apps. Remind, Edmodo, Google Classroom and the Talkingpoints app are a few of the many easy-to-use apps for contacting parents and students. These tools allow teachers to manage multiple classes and send individual or group communications, such as reminders about tests, quizzes and due dates. New features are continually being added to these apps, like the ability to post quizzes, polls or photo files.

  The Talkingpoints app can even translate text into twenty different languages, which is a wonderful feature for parents to whom English is not their first language.

  
  
  
  
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  Phone call. Some situations require more personal and delicate means of communication. A voice-to-voice conversation delivers nuance and emphasis in ways that typed messages cannot.
  

Phone calls can also be more efficient. There will be times that an email exchange between a teacher and a parent evolves into a back-and-forth message chain that spans several days. A 15-minute phone call can save the teacher and parent the time and hassle.
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