Three typical mistakes that schools should avoid when dealing with parents

Overview of the topic:

In principle, communication between schools and parents works well in Switzerland, as a team of researchers has discovered. However, when problems do arise, it is often the case that parents do not know exactly how they should be involved in their child's development at school.

Sometimes the school's expectations can also lead to uncertainty at home: On the one hand, the teacher thinks that the child should take care of the homework themselves. On the other hand, parents hear at parents' evenings that their child's homework is often incomplete.

And last but not least, parents can feel helpless when their child is judged at parents' evenings and they have to listen powerlessly. In the following text, Stefanie Rietzler and Fabian Grolimund explain what the school should look out for when dealing with parents.

When it comes to the relationship between home and school, the research team led by Roger Keller and Reto Luder can report positive results: «The majority of respondents in German-speaking Switzerland are satisfied with their children's school situation. They have confidence in their teachers, feel sufficiently informed and are confident that their children are developing positively,» say the researchers from the Zurich University of Teacher Education, who surveyed parents across Switzerland in 2020 about their collaboration with school.

Nevertheless, it happens time and again that the relationship is strained and parents and teachers judge each other as «difficult» or «incompetent».

Teachers often see the reason for this in the fact that many parents simply have no idea what the school can and cannot do - they simply don't know what it's like to have to teach 20 to 25 children at the same time. When we ask at further training courses for teachers whether conversations with parents who are teachers themselves are particularly easy, we hear sentences like «No, they're the hardest!» or «Well, when it comes to my own children, I'm not the easiest either». It's often neither «incompetent» teachers nor «difficult» parents, nor a general lack of understanding of the school's situation that makes collaboration difficult - but a handful of typical communication traps. If you recognise these and don't fall into them, you can avoid many unnecessary conflicts. We would like to introduce you to three of them.

Parents do not know what is expected of them

Almost all parents are faced with the question of how they should be involved in their child's development at school. Do they have to supervise and correct the homework? Force the child to do it if it doesn't do it on its own? Help prepare a presentation? Practise reading or maths with the child if they are weak in these areas? Review missed content from the weekly plan with the child?

Mothers and fathers are often in a rather passive role in parental discussions and have to listen

In many teaching staff, there is no consensus on these issues and they are therefore rarely discussed at parents' evenings. Cooperation with parents improves when the role of parents is discussed within the teaching team and a common denominator is agreed upon. For example, with the help of questions such as: What do we want from parents at our school? What can parents actually do and what can't they do? What expectations do we communicate to parents and in what form?

The school's role expectations are contradictory

Sometimes the school communicates certain expectations in advance, such as: «The children are responsible for their own homework and learning. Parents should not help or correct the content, but merely provide a quiet place to study.» However, the school does not act accordingly. How does it work, for example, if parents are encouraged not to help, but then suddenly realise that challenging assignments such as preparing a presentation are given as homework? And what if the children who get the best grades are the ones whose parents help a lot?

And how should you react if you are told at the parents' meeting that the child is having great difficulty with reading or often brings home incomplete homework and that it is important for parents to keep an eye on this? At the parents' evening, it was still said that this was the responsibility of the children and the school. Many parents feel frustrated after such discussions: «Now I've done exactly what the teacher recommended - and in the end I'm being made out as if I don't care enough about my child.»

Such contradictions can make parents feel insecure, ashamed and trigger aggression. Accordingly, the climate between home and school can be improved if the school either consistently signals how parents should be involved in the child's progress at school or actually takes full responsibility for the learning process - especially when difficulties arise.

Parents are rendered helpless in the parental interview

The parent-teacher conference is not only a difficult situation for teachers, but also for parents. Especially when there are problems in the room. With the good intention of informing the parents, teachers often describe not only the strengths of the child but also very specifically what the child cannot do «age-appropriately», what it lacks, what skills it should develop according to the curriculum but has not yet shown.

Parents are often in a rather passive role and have to listen and endure how someone judges their child.

This is particularly difficult when problems are simply posed in the room:

• "Eren stares holes in the air during self-organised learning and doesn't make any progress. He can't concentrate at all. "
• "Maria has a lot of trouble reading. She reads very haltingly and often doesn't understand the assignments."
• "Paula can never really get involved in the groups and hardly ever speaks up in class. She often spends the break on her own."

After such statements, the question immediately arises in the parents' minds: "What does that mean now?" And they want a good answer.

Eren's father wants to know what they can do as parents at home so that their child stops looking out of the window at 9.30 a.m. next Monday during self-organised learning and gets involved in their tasks. Maria's mum needs guidance on what they, as parents, should do to support her daughter in learning to read, or she wants to know what the school is doing to ensure her child doesn't fall behind. Paula's parents need clarity as to whether the teacher sees their child's reserved, somewhat shy behaviour as a problem that needs to be addressed - or whether she accepts it as a characteristic of her child and just wants to report back an observation.

Discussions with parents immediately become better and more constructive when teachers keep problem descriptions brief, ask for the parents' point of view and work out solutions together. It is helpful for both parties if the parents are recognised as experts on their child and actively ask what else they think could be done to better support the child at school.