Every educator needs to communicate. And communicate well. How can you improve your communication? Make these small adjustments for the rest of this school year and then plan to make these adjustments for next school year to improve your communication.
This School Year Communication
Communication: Improve it this school year, plan to improve it next school year.
Be Redundant
Post the same information in several places. Why? Because when your students, or families find the information on their first try they will feel successful and think highly of your organization.
Email Answer Time
Aside from urgent emails, consider breaking your parents from expecting an immediate response. It is not efficient to answer each email as it comes in, and you are training parents to send multiple emails and potentially hijack your class time. Set aside time during planning to open and answer parent emails. If parents become concerned at the change in your frequency in your Inbox, consider adding to your email signature, “emails returned within 24 hours.”
Work Availability
Make your classwork more available online. No, you cannot go paperless all at once. However these are some places to start. Start with the items that students/parents are most often requesting new copies of: study guides? project rubrics? Take those couple/few documents and find a place to post them online for this school year. You know your families, but I suggest Google Docs.
Next School Year Communication
Be Redundant
Prepare by posting the basic information families and students seek in as many places as you imagine may be checked. Use the same messaging to ‘check your website/Google Classroom/whatever first,’ but then post everywhere someone could conceivably check. This extra work by you pays off when you do not have to answer the same question/request 30-150 times over. That and your sanity, it saves your sanity.
Email Answer Time
In addition to cleaning up your email response time, there are further steps you could take to streamline email efficiency. Add an automatic response or filter emails by sender. Add your response time to your Syllabus, website, and email signature (if you didn’t already do that last year).
Work Availability
Strategically select the most important, most frequently requested, or the item which causes you the most hassle to reproduce. I suggest you make all of any type of item available online all year; that might mean all your study guides, or projects. You want students and families to associate that type of work with that online location(s). This is some front end loading on your part, but has huge efficiency gains over the course of a school year for you too!
Hopefully these immediate and long-term changes can make an impact on your quality of communication and the experience of your students and families – and for you!
What other tips might you have for improving communication right now and into next school year?
2018-01-30 at 2:40 pm
I like the post everywhere idea so information can be found easily. As a parent, I find that would be very useful and more efficient. It helps reduce frustration on time spent searching for information.
2018-01-30 at 5:36 pm
I like that you have suggested putting work online, I have found that very helpful as a parent!
2018-01-30 at 6:29 pm
Don’t have to worry about school issues anymore. Will pass on to my grown children. I talk to my three kids everyday. We are very close.
2018-01-30 at 10:49 pm
OMG YES about the designated email time. If i spent all day answering emails, then no instruction would get done!
a few of my friends handed out their number to parents so they could text whenever. THAAATs pushing it a little too much for me!
i’m stealing these tips whenever i go back into the classroom!
2018-01-30 at 10:51 pm
Justine, I really think parents would appreciate once they got used to it – they would know when to expect a response.
2018-01-31 at 12:28 am
These sound like great communication tips for educators. I love Google Docs for managing my work and collaboration with others.
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2018-01-31 at 8:50 am
Great ways to improve for educators!
2018-01-31 at 3:31 pm
As a former classroom teacher, I believe these are great ways to improve communication. I would always answer emails as quickly as possible. Something I would change if I were still in the classroom.
2018-02-01 at 7:39 am
You are so right about e-mail answer time! When I was teaching, I started out the year answering e-mails immediately. As the year went on and I couldn’t, the parents got frustrated. I love the idea of having an automatic response; that is brilliant!
2018-02-01 at 9:25 am
I wish everyone had this mindset!
2018-02-02 at 9:21 pm
I feel like these tips can be applied in any job situation, not only teaching!
2018-02-24 at 11:55 pm
Effective communication underpins the knowledge, skills and dispositions principals require to have a direct and indirect influence on student outcomes, as identified in the Best Evidence Synthesis on leadership.
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