3 Ways to Support Parents While Remote Teaching - Making Sure No One Gets Left Behind!
Thu 30 July, 2020
This period of lockdown has not only been hard on children, but parents too.
As teachers, you know how tough it can be to support and encourage children through education; now many parents are having to do this at home alongside remote working themselves. Couple this with the likelihood of learning how to use new technology to communicate with the school, and it is clear why many parents may feel completely overwhelmed.
How You Can Help!
As teachers, you are in an ideal position to support remote education and ensure both children and parents cope well during these unprecedented times.
You may already know which students in your class are most likely to be struggling; whether this is due to their home life or other factors. You are also likely to know which parent will be struggling the most.
By keeping communication open and offering support you will be able to make a huge difference to these students and their parents.
1. Communication Is Key
One of the main issues we have heard from our clients regarding remote teaching has been the high levels of miscommunication between parents, students and teachers. So, where possible try to keep the parents involved in the communication, don’t just rely on your students to tell their parents what needs to be done.
A good way of doing this is to create a weekly email update to parents of your class. This can work as a mini newsletter, including details of the topics for the week, the work expectations and offering tips or advice to parents on how to support their child.
You could also create a virtual "parent group", this can work as a cross between a parent-teacher evening and a social parent support group. You can set this up through G-Suite for Education.
This will provide parents with a place to chat with other parents about issues they are facing, while also offering them a place to contact teachers and discuss their child’s education.
2. Tracking Progress
When working with students in a classroom environment, it is often relatively easy to see which students are getting left behind and who needs extra support. But when teaching remotely this can be much harder. To ensure no one is left behind you can track student’s activity on G-Suite for education to spot those you are disengaged.
Once you notice a student who is disengaged rather than confronting the student, try checking in with the parents. Are the parents confident on how to use the technology? Are they aware the student hasn’t been participating?
You may find some of these parents are struggling due to their own lack of academic confidence. If a student is getting left behind and their parents also feel out of their depth academically, this is a recipe for a disengaged and frustrated child. This links to offering parents teaching resources alongside a list of required work.
3. Share Resources
This doesn’t just mean giving students an endless list of work to do. Think carefully about the resources you can offer parents, maybe you can share tips for how to teach common problems. Record a video showing parents where students commonly go wrong on a topic and then show them how to spot and correct this. Your students will learn better and the parents will feel more connected to their child’s education.
Using Google Drive, you can share a whole host of resources. And because you can control who has access to different folders, you can even make a parent only folder which offers additional teaching tips and resources.
Get in touch to find out how we can help you to implement these tools in your school.