Back to School night can be nerve wracking for teachers. You are on stage and under a microscope. Having heard all about you at the dinner table, parents finally get to take a look at you for themselves. Some may come eager to see the teacher their child raves about, and some may come with complaints, grievances and rotten fruit for missiles.
Preparing for BTSN is anxiety-ridden to be sure. But if the rights things happen, it is invaluable and even sets the template for your relationship with parents for the whole year.
As a veteran of 30 Back To School night parent presentations–and not one tarring and feathering amongst them–I want to share a few suggestions for making BTSN not only successful, but an integral tool in your professional relationships.
You can get pulled off course on back to school night
Far too many teachers on Back to School night spend far too much time reviewing procedure. Classroom rules and regs. Grading percentages and point totals. Parking. Cafeteria schedules. This is understandable. People have questions about where to drop off forgotten lunches and they need that kind of information. My issue is: The intellectual dialogue of BTSN is far too important to be wasted on procedural stuff. Your school’s website has that nuts and bolts information to reference at any time.
These issues are to be avoided when you speak to parents. Why? The more you talk about procedures, the more the idea creeps into peoples’ heads that the school’s purposes are purely procedural. I’ve talked about the job overwhelming the mission, which can happen on Back to School night too.
Tip 1:
Do not spend time on the institution. Prepare instead to describe the curriculum, to show parents what their youngsters will be learning and why. Tell what core questions of the subject will guide student inquiry. What books are in the curriculum and why they were chosen. Explain how the curriculum will transform the youngsters and touch their hearts. How will it whet their appetites for more?
Tip 2:
Describe a typical day in your classroom. If someone dropped in at 10:10 am on a Tuesday, what would be taking place in your room and why? What would a parent see? Why would that activity be valuable?
Tip 3:
Avoid discussing the progress of a particular youngster with a parent. Many will approach you in full earnest, hoping to get feedback on their child’s progress so far. It is a natural impulse. But having this conversation, at this moment, diverts from your duty for the evening. It is a longer conversation than you have time for, and if you converse with one parent, then others will hope for the same. Again, this is understandable and should not cause teachers to frown. Gently deflect such questions and ask the folks to make an appointment to talk when you both have time for a longer conversation.
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You have tremendous power
Remember that you have asymmetrical power in the lives of families. Over their days with your classes, over their nights with homework, over their futures with grades. While you may have 120 students per day, and think about each one only sporadically, you loom large in their lives. They have only six or seven teachers. The presence that you are in their lives is enormous.
Honor that power by showing parents how you’ll give your all this year, how you’ll set the example of love for learning, how the future of each child is as dear to you as it is to them. Show the parents on Back to School night that you are sincere, that you will not yield in believing in every youngster, that you love the curriculum and can’t wait to share it every day.
When parents see that you are dedicated and worthy of their trust, that you love children and are eager to work with them, then your relationship settles into a stable and pragmatic arrangement. They will phone you, not the Board president, if they have a concern. They trust you to resolve it and don’t CC the administration on the email. They won’t chronically dispute grades; they’ll trust your judgment.
The foundation of the arrangement is mutual love for the youngster and the treasuring of her future. BTSN can be a huge deposit in the bank account of goodwill. You are a towering figure in the lives of the children you teach, so your voice must always be gentle. Sometimes you must discipline or sanction a youngster. You will be able to because the relationship account has a substantial balance of trust that can cover the withdrawal. New teachers are admittedly vulnerable here, because until a teacher has established a track record of several years’ results, people will question your judgment more readily.
Trust takes years to earn. Start the process on back to school night.