For many parents, keeping in touch with our schools and teachers is as difficult as it is for teachers to keep in touch with today’s working parents. Research shows that getting parents involved with what is happening in schools can improve student behavior, attendance, and achievement. Parents need information from schools and schools need to provide important information for student success.
Parents need tips from teachers on how to help at home, what is being learned day-to-day, and basic study strategies so they are able to reinforce the daily learning. Quick emails, postcards, and newsletters are not enough. Often, phone calls do not prove to work simply because a phone call from a teacher usually means trouble. Schools that are successful with two-way information go out of the box to open the levels of communication. It’s not about who attends PTA meetings or is a volunteer at the book fair. It’s about reaching out to all parents.
A pilot was conducted through Stanford University. The study concluded, “the texts, on average, helped increase the frequency with which parents engaged in home literacy activities, such as telling stories, going over words that rhyme or completing puzzles together. Participating parents also showed high levels of engagement by asking teachers questions about their children’s growth.”
Texting is a quick and easy way to enable teachers and parents to view progress, give daily work tips, or even pictures of classroom successes. It builds productive parent-teacher relationships and it takes only a few minutes to send. In that parents view phone calls as negative, texting proves easier than taking the time to log on to the school’s web page, read what is needed for the evening assignments and send a question through an email. Too often, parents expect a speedy response from an email and don’t realize that teachers often check emails either in the beginning or the end of the day.
There are many programs that assist schools in texting such as: Remind, Kikutext, ClassPager, gText, SendHub, WeTxt. There are also apps like: BuzzMob, The Teacher App & Grade Book, Collaborize Classroom, Remind 101, TeacherKit, Running Start, Google Apps for education.
Texting avoids long unpleasant phone conversations and makes a simple ‘note’ much easier. Informed parents are happy parents. If there is a problem, then make an appointment for a conference. Negative remarks should be made in person or through a personal one-on-one conversation, not a text message.
Keeping texts positive and using them to reinforce short tips toward student success will build a trust level between school and home.
Open the communication gap with parents and schools, especially with the parents that are not able to get to the school for meetings or conferences. With parents sending and receiving more text messages by the day, there isn’t any reason schools aren’t included. Texting tips from classrooms are a method of getting parents involved in the school system. Today’s social networks make it easy to keep people in touch and involved. Keep the emails, web pages, newsletters, daily announcements, etc. but; include text messages as a personal touch from each classroom. Think out of the box and overcome barriers that exclude some parents. We do not want any child to fall between the cracks.
