3 Tips for Simplifying Parent Communication
Back to school season is here! This means a whole slew of new students, and families to go with them. Do you get a little anxious when you think about parent communication? Or maybe you have some great systems in place for communicating with your families, but you love some new ideas. Today I have three tips for parent communication that you can apply the school year. And, I’ve added some actionable steps to go with each tip!
Don’t have time to read this blog post? Scroll down to the bottom to find the video version!
Tip 1: Parent communication should be consistent.
Your families should hear from you around the same time every week. This can be through a newsletter that you send out on the same day, an app that you update with new information each week, or a website that you set a time to add to.
You will see fewer small questions pop up in your inbox if parents know to consistently expect answers from you before they start worrying. If your families don’t know when they will hear from you next, they will be more likely to send you those random emails about the upcoming field trip or the class party. This results in you answering the same questions over and over again. Answer the questions in bulk before your parents even know they have them! Stick to a routine.
Action step: Choose a template for a monthly newsletter. This can be emailed out, uploaded to a site, or just an outline of bullet points to add to an app or other communication system.
Set a reminder on your calendar to prep it on the same day every week. Then, set an additional reminder to email it out on the same day every week. These days do not have to be the same.
In fact, I had a lot of success with newsletters that were sent out early on Mondays. The sooner in the week, you can catch your families’ attention, the more likely they will be to read it. How likely are you to take action on something that you receive on a Friday afternoon? Probably not very likely. The parents of your students are the same way. If they see an email come in from you on Friday afternoon, and they tell themselves they will get to it later, they will likely forget about it by Monday.
Tip 2: Parent communication should be proactive.
You should be the first one to reach out as often as possible. Yes, parents will send you emails. But those emails should be about things that you couldn’t have addressed because you didn’t know about them.
Injuries, behavioral problems, grades slipping, or even stellar work. Those are all reasons to reach out before a parent has a chance to reach out to you!
Action tip:
As you encounter different reasons to write emails this year, right to the first one very carefully then copy and paste it over into a word document. Title each page of the document with the theme of the email. Example “student injuries”
The next time a similar issue happens, go into your email templates document and pull the last email you wrote on that topic. You obviously will need to change quite a bit, but you will have the bones there. You will know exactly how a parent responded to that email, that it was proofread, and that you were as professional as possible.
Having “the bones “already done for you will make sending out emails faster as the year goes on.
Want to speed up the process even more? I have a set of email templates in my TPT store! Simply find the topic you need to write an email about, copy and paste my text over to an email, and change out the relevant information!
Tip 3: Parent communication should be positive.
We’ve all heard this 1 million times. If you need to address an issue with the student’s family, start with something positive. It also benefits your relationship with the student and their family if you reach out to just say something positive without an issue even being on the horizon. If a family hears from you on occasion when you are simply saying nice things about their student, they will have an open mind if you need to reach out about an issue in the future. They will already know how invested you are in their student, and how closely you pay attention.
Action tip: Grab some sticky notes and write your students’ names on them. Keep the stack on your desk and each day during the first couple of weeks of school, pull one off of the stack and stick it on a student’s folder, agenda, or simply hand it to them.
Jot down a shout-out for something great you saw them do that week. This could be a behavior, a character trait they demonstrated, or something they did academically. Plain old sticky notes work for this, but if you want to be a little extra you can grab my printable templates for sticking out shout-outs here!
Grab my parent communication bundle to get the resources linked in this post and more at 20% off! Set yourself up for parent communication success this year!
Watch the Video Version
