The Future of Parent Teacher Communication
It’s no surprise that the way people are communicating is changing. However, this change in the way people connect has major implications for how parents connect to their children’s educators. Parents are often busier, rely on more than one platform to receive information, and are constantly bombarded by information from many different sources outside of their child’s school. As leaders in the education sphere, it is important to anticipate the ever-changing communication habits of parents and adapt accordingly in order to improve parent engagement and ensure the best experience for each student.
Edlio is an organization that focuses on developing technology that connects school and home in better, more effective ways. Here are some of the exciting, new trends happening in parent-teacher communication that can inspire your communication methods.
Trends in Parent Teacher Communication
Personalization
No two students are exactly the same, and no two parents are the alike either. Therefore, to successfully connect with parents, it is important to reach them where they are. Many parents can receive email, text messages, calls, and push notifications; however, because of their schedule or work style, they may be more responsive to one over the other. A parent’s preferred method of communication can easily be conveyed to their child’s school, and more and more it is being taken into account when a teacher needs to grab the attention of the parent. Instead of receiving robocall after robocall, schools can now send a quick text or push notification through your CMS to communicate quickly!
Additionally, due to the advanced communication tools out there, teachers are able to send personalized messages to parents about how their child is doing. Instead of calling a busy parent only to leave a voicemail, many CMS features are now making it possible to send personalized, secure two-way messaging.
Analytics
Anybody who has ever worked in a school has struggled with a parent who is hard to reach. Either they are so busy that important notices about their child simply go unnoticed, or they just prefer a more hands-off approach. With advances in data management and analytics, some schools now have technology platforms that can track which of their communication platforms are proving to be most effective. For those particularly challenging parents, school administrators can even go and discover which messages they have opened in the past to see what could be the best way of grabbing their attention.
Because parent involvement is important to a child’s success in school, school leaders can also use data to track which campaigns attempting to increase parent involvement have been the most successful and incorporate them into future years. The messages and campaigns that are not being noticed by parents can be pushed aside in order to devote more energy and resources to grabbing parents’ attention using the methods that have proved to be superior.
Paperless Feedback
Another great advancement in parent teacher communication is the ability to send important e-forms directly to parents. Permission slips, back-to-school information forms, and emergency contact sheets always seem to go missing somewhere between school and home. This can cause a headache for parents and teachers alike. However, there is an exciting trend happening in which forms are no longer printed and handed to students, but rather they are created online and simply sent to parents directly. Some school websites even have a place where important forms are stored in case one gets accidentally deleted. This instantaneous way to receive important feedback and permissions from parents streamlines a process that used to take weeks.
Multilingual Considerations
Many of today’s students have parents that come from a variety of backgrounds. In a more culturally-integrated world, it is important to meet the needs of parents who may not speak the language that is most common in their child’s school. Some content management systems now offer features that automatically translate important notifications and documents to the parent’s chosen language. This can eliminate miscommunication and confusion that language barriers may cause. Also, having a child’s school take it into consideration that a different language may be spoken at home improves the relationship between schools and parents.
This is just a list of some of the exciting trends happening in parent communication. As technology continues to improve, connecting with students’ parents will be easier than ever leading to an overall enriched experience for each student.