There is no more complex and tender geography than the borderlands between families and schools. Everyone believes that parents and teachers should be allies and partners. After all, we are all engaged in the important and precious work of raising, guiding, and teaching our children. But all too often, parents and teachers feel estranged from and suspicious of each other. The relationship can become competitive and adversarial rather than collaborative and empathic. What can teachers do to build stronger ties? Nearly all the teachers I interviewed reported that they receive little, if any, training on building successful relationships with the parents of the children that they teach. Yet, how teachers approach encounters with parents from the first day has a profound effect not only on how parents view the school, but also on the child's experience in and outlook on school and learning as a whole. Teachers need to develop strategies, tools, and skills for supporting productive dialogue with parents. They need to value the authority and wisdom of parents.
To parents, their child is the most important person in their lives, the one who arouses their deepest passions and greatest vulnerabilities, and the one who inspires their fiercest advocacy and protection. And it is teachers--society's professional adults--who are the primary people with whom the parents must seek alliance and support in the crucial work of child rearing. Parents must quickly learn to release their child and trust that he or she will be well cared for by a perfect stranger. This is a hard thing to do. All of the parent's expectations and fears, as well as their own memories--positive and negative--of school experiences, get loaded on to encounters with teachers.
In his 1932 book, Sociology of Teaching, Willard Waller suggests that some tension between parents and teachers is inevitable because of the different roles and functions they play in the lives of children. Parents, he claims, have a "particularistic" relationship with their child, in which the bond is deeply passionate and individualistic. Teachers, on the other hand, have a "universalistic" relationship with their students, one which is more distant and dispassionate. Teachers work hard to find a balance between responding to the needs and capacities of individual students and supporting the development of a classroom community in which children learn to be responsible and accountable to the group.
In other words, when parents plead with the teacher to be fair to their child, they are usually asking for special consideration for their youngster. They want the teacher to consider the unique struggles and strengths of their child and respond accordingly. But when teachers talk about being "fair" to everyone, they mean giving equal amounts of attention, judging everyone by the same objective, universal standards, and using explicit and public criteria for making judgments. Inevitably, said Waller, these differences in perspective produce conflicts and distrust--often masked and oblique--between parents and teachers, even though both would claim that they are laboring with "the best interest of the child" foremost in their minds.
In my research on the parent-teacher relationship, I talked with many strong teachers who prided themselves on the successful relationships they build with their students' families. Most felt the key to their success in working with parents was the ability to put the child--their strengths and their vulnerabilities, their achievements and their challenges--at the center of the parent-teacher conversation. Keeping the focus on the child encourages a conversation that speaks to the unique temperament and capacities of the child--seeing the "whole child" from a variety of angles ("the whole 360 degrees," as one teacher put it). It avoids a conversation that puts forth a narrow view of the child--a recitation of his or her weaknesses or frivolous, ungrounded praise.
In the examples that follow, three teachers talk about how they build and, when needed, mend relationships with parents.
Molly Rose, a first-grade teacher in a city school that serves a largely poor, immigrant population, speaks about "the child as a bridge" between home and school and gives the child the most visible and audible role in her work with parents. "Almost everything I do with parents is with the child at the center," says Molly.
The first communication with the family occurs before school begins, and--true to her word--it is sent to the child. In early August, Molly writes a simple letter to each child in her class, telling each one about her summer. "Last August," she recalls, "I wrote that 'I read a lot of good books, I went swimming, and I went hiking.' Then I added a picture of myself hiking." Along with the letter, Molly attaches a blank page, and she asks each child to draw a picture of his or her summer and have an adult help write a letter back to her.
