Today in my Exploring Teaching As A Profession semester class, my students and I looked a series of articles from the September 15, 2021 edition of Education Week magazine, as I had copied three articles for them to take a look at to decide which one(s) they wanted to read together to discuss.
For context, we’re near the end of our semester together, so the endeavors we are embarking on are about putting their learning, thinking, experience, and dreams together as potential future educators – or pre-pre-service teachers, as I lovingly call them. We’ve re-examined our thoughts for what issues will be central / significant in education for “2021 & Beyond” (created after our collaborative timeline of American education), thought about the things we’ve love to change and the things we love about school, and they’ve already articulated a series of items for a “Reform Agenda.”
The article they chose surprised me as it was one about parental engagement in schooling: “Parents Are More Engaged. How to Keep It Going” by Alyson Klein.
The piece talks about how parents were quite involved with education during remote learning experiences, and their communication shifted from the typical discipline issues to what their children needed in order to be ready to learn. Klein notes that reactions to this were positive, and many parents felt more confident in helping their children succeed in school as they understood more clearly both what their children were doing as well as how they might help them.
When our read aloud ended, I asked students what was on their mind, what they were thinking about after reading this piece. Multiple hands went in the air – lots had lots to say. What follows are two categories – they began with what doesn’t work in parental involvement, and then what they wish parents knew about how to engage with them.
To folks at home: Your children know you mean well, mostly, but they want you to know:
Folks at home, please DON’T:
- Deliver consequences for actions at school – i.e., bad grades or even in discipline scenarios – without having conversations with us about what happened and why
- Nag us about bad stuff – bad grades, bad moods, missing assignments
Students talked about how sometimes they simply get bad grades on quizzes and tests and have to suffer insult upon injury from parents who don’t engage in a dialogue about why things didn’t go well, but rather who issue punishments / consequences blindly. Students feel these incidents are sometimes infrequent, sometimes explainable by bad days, sometimes going to be common occurrences for subjects they struggle with, and the consequences just don’t help. The request to not “nag us” fell in a similar category – students wanted to have conversations about what was going on, though they admitted that sometimes they don’t want to talk about it because “it will resolve itself” or “I was having a bad time” or “I just don’t want to talk about it. I struggle in that class, and it’s just always going to be that way. It doesn’t make me a bad kid, and I’m actually a smart kid, just not in math.”
- Comparing grades / achievements between siblings
One student shared that her parents constantly berate her younger brother for his lack of good grades / achievement in math (there’s a motif here) and do it noting that his big sister did so much better than him and so why can’t he do better. My student – the older sister – expressed that it made him feel terrible, and that she even talked with her parents and asked them to stop, saying it was both unfair and that she had had a better teacher at that age then her brother currently does. When I asked if she took it upon herself to speak with her brother alone when she said “they won’t stop,” she admitted that she did because she felt so bad for him, and that she’s helping him with the math and trying to tell him not to feel so bad but it’s hard to convince him after what their parents say.
Several students chimed in, noting they suffered comparisons over siblings even when parents didn’t intend to be comparing them, bringing up the idea of backhanded compliments as the means by which they felt insulted by parental “compliments.” One example shared was “They told me I was doing a great job considering this wasn’t my favorite subject like it was for my brother. That did not make me feel good at all.”
- Parents emailing teachers to find out what’s going on / what can be done about kids’ grades
My students are between grades 10 and 12, and they all indicated that they didn’t like when their parents went “above my head” or “behind my back” or even just “stepped in for me when I could be doing it myself.” They felt that parents should give them some time to figure things out rather than watching the grade book app like hawks, looking for things to either nag their kids about or get involved with. One student noted he did not appreciate his mother asking for extra help sessions when he really didn’t want to go to them, saying he was just fine with the grades he was getting.
I found this one fascinating as sometimes it seems my teenage students really need more parenting than they get. I was inspired to hear them talking about how they wished their parents could just show them at a younger age how to email and advocate for themselves, and then leave them to it. This led to a conversation about learned helplessness, their lack of coping skills for when things don’t go well, and the policing of grades and behavior they felt their parents were engaging in.
Folks at home, please DO:
- Give me / leave me notes of encouragement.
- Give me compliments on my efforts, not necessarily on my grades.
- Recognize my hard work even when the outcome is not great.
- Be aware of the pressure you can be putting on us even when you don’t mean to.
- Tell us stories about yourself that relate to what we’re going through.
- Ask us to tell you about what we learned, and be excited to have conversations with us about it. We don’t want you to ask us if our homework is done. That shows us you don’t care about the learning, you just care about the grade or us being done. We don’t learn to be excited about the learning then.
After reading the article one student – a senior! – talked about how her relationship with her mother changed during remote learning because she and her mom talked about what she was actually learning, rather than the logistics of school. They got into conversations about the topics, subjects, issues, history, texts, stuff in science, and she really enjoyed that because it made her so excited to go back to class the next day to learn more to bring home to talk about. She appreciated this change, as it helped her to see school in a different light and she knew she could lean on her mom for help or advice when she needed it.
If folks at home can start with this last one above, well, I bet you’ll get the other ones mostly right, too. Oh, and heads up: it’s never too late to start.