The Essential Conversation - What Parents and Teachers Can Learn From Each Other

by Sarah Lawrence-Lightfoot

Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, Professor of Education at Harvard, says at the outset of the book, “from my point of view, there is no more complex and tender geography than the borderlands between families and schools.” The author focuses on the parent-teacher conferences “as a way of revealing and illuminating the macrocosm of institutional and cultural forces that define family-school relationships.”

The book focuses on a number of teachers who are unusually good at joining forces with parents on behalf of children. I was pleased to see that some of the “best practices” she identifies are ones that I have experienced repeatedly at my daughter’s elementary school. They include: soliciting input from the parents about the child, sending a letter of introduction to the parents at the beginning of the year, calling parents to check in, and sending home newsletters or regular letters describing what’s going on in class.

The author makes the point, however, that most teachers receive almost no formal training or preparation in how to productively relate to the parents of their students. And, just as teachers benefit from guidance and role models, so do parents who are balancing advocating for their child while honoring and strengthening their relationship with the child’s teacher.

The teachers she observes teach in varied environments. One type of school community that intrigued me was the “privileged environment.” Dr. Lawrence-Lightfoot says this about the benefits and drawbacks of this setting:

“Teachers who work in elite, privileged environments speak about both the benefits and drawbacks of working with parents who are well educated and ambitious for their children. They admire and depend on the parents’ interest, engagement, and participation in school events, their support and advocate of their children, and their shared views about the value of education. The teachers can also count on a common vocabulary and an ease of communication. But they also experience affluent parents as disarming and difficult. They notice how easily their advocacy can slide into an overbearing intrusiveness and how their lofty ambitions put a heavy stress on their youngsters that can inhibit and distort learning. Teachers are then in the awkward position of trying to protect student’s from their parents’ unrealistic demands. And, in the presence of high-powered and influential parents, teachers often feel diminished and disrespected, relegated to the role of servant or hired hands.”

One antidote may be helping both parents and teachers to be more conscious of this underlying but unacknowledged tension and to encourage meaningful conversation about how real people – not the caricatures of people – actually think and feel. I think that is why teachers can often feel close to and supported by many individual parents (and vice versa) but can be wary of parent’s motivations as a group.

Adopting my new favorite author Margaret Wheatley’s view of information as the source of life would also be helpful. She talks about the importance of having information “coursing through our systems, disturbing the peace, imbuing everything it touches with the possibility of new life.” This perspective places suggestion and advocacy in a different category – one of information that offers the rich possibility that could move us to new levels of understanding, instead of a potentially damaging force to be resisted and defended against.

Her book also reminds me that it is essential to connect with and represent moderate parent voices – otherwise we risk being being defined by the truly “disarming and difficult” parents among us who are hopefully small in number but, through their negative impact, can make their presence feel disproportionately larger.

On another note entirely, she is a firm advocate for conferences that involve the student. She says “Children should be present – and given a voice – at parent-teacher conferences. They are the only people who know both the family and the school domains. They are the best interpreters of and authorities on their own experience. Their presence helps the adults stay focused on their primary reason for coming together in the first place: to support the learning and development of the child.” She would like children to be involved beginning in elementary school all the way through high school.

If you want to learn more, check out this great review of the book by school consultant David Mallery.

Comments

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