How to Harry Wong Hybrid Learning Part Three: Connecting & Communicating with Parents

Harry Wong insists the two most important groups of people in a child's life are their parents and their teachers. Now more than ever, parents and teachers need to be a team to support student learning - especially in the remote setting. Parents may not be homeschooling our students, but they are more involved with the learning process than they have ever been before. So we need to follow Wong's teachings by inviting parents to the table, connecting with them as much as possible, and creating a support system together.

Going into the start of the year, I refuse to make the same mistakes I made in March. Over the course of this article, I'm going to talk about different tools and strategies you can use when reaching out to parents. My goal is to avoid some of the more infuriating or tedious aspects of parent communication and turn parents into valuable resources and support systems.

Inviting Parents to the Team

I don't know about you, but one of my most frustrating struggles during remote learning was trying to get ahold of kids and their parents. Schools and teachers were not prepared to lose all face-to-face contact with students over a weekend. Sometimes there just wasn't any contact information in Powerschool or Genesis (or whatever program your school uses.) Then, even more frustrating, there was incorrect information listed. One parent I tried to contact was missing a digit from their phone number. Another email was misspelled - and the email was their last name 🤦. Luckily, that one was pretty easy to figure out, but you often end up playing Sherlock Holmes to chase down some basic contact info.

Use Google Forms To Get "Real" Contact Info

In the first week of school, I'm sending out a Parent & Guardian Survey Google Form. I'm requiring parents to provide active email addresses and phone numbers for all adults I should contact about their child — and it's a completion grade. I'm asking for cell phone numbers, instead of home phone numbers, so I can text or Slydial them if I want to. More on that later.

I plan to use this survey to get some information about my new students and their families. I added some reflection questions about remote learning last year to give me an idea of what was challenging for them. Additionally, I included two opportunities for parents to reveal more personal information if they need to by asking two important questions. One, is there's anything you want to share with me? Two, would you like to speak on the phone about anything? Families are going through a lot right now. I'm hoping this opens the door to inform me about anything going on at home that might affect the child's learning, behavior, or attitude, so I can adjust accordingly and approach with informed empathy.

Welcome Parents into Your Classroom

So, you have their contact information, now what?

Despite the fact that The First Days of School was written almost 20 years ago, Wong perfectly explains out how to make a positive first impression on your students' parents. First, send an email introducing yourself. Wong suggests to include things like a picture of you and your classroom, a welcome video, a letter, the general curriculum for the first month, ways to contact and communicate with you, etc. (There's a ton more, so go dig your copy out of that weird box or bookshelf of college stuff you have tucked away somewhere. We're looking at page 103.) In the past, I've sent home a letter, but I waited to make more intimate introductions at Back to School Night. Not this year. I need to be besties with these parents from the very start.

I'm going to email a welcome video instead of my typical letter home. Seeing and hearing me is important for parents because of how disconnected we all feel right now. I plan to record my welcome video in my classroom, so parents can see more of my personality and teaching style. I'm going to introduce myself and the curriculum, and I'm going to invite them to partner with me in their child's learning experience this year. It's important to keep the video short and sweet. The idea isn't to fill them in on everything happening this year (although Wong might disagree with me here). It's just to give them a welcoming face, and let them know you care about their child. There's time to share more information later. Also in the email, I will include all of my contact information, important links, and an invitation to a Google Meet & Greet.

After the first week of school, I'm going to give parents the opportunity to see and talk to me about any questions they have through a Google Meet & Greet. I think this will relieve a lot of tension from anxious parents and act as an early Back to School Night. It also just lets the parents know I'm available and willing to work with them.

Make a few phone calls

Harry Wong also tells us, beyond a welcome letter or video, it's really important to reach out and call parents at the beginning of the year and to follow up after the first couple of weeks. Parent contact through phone calls or video is really important to establishing relationships and showing parents you are on their team. It gives you a platform to really talk and listen - both of which email does not do as effectively.

First thing first, go make yourself a Google Voice number if you haven't already. It's a free app you can download onto your phone with a lot of great features - mainly, you don't have to use your private phone number to call parents. You can still call, leave voicemails, and send text messages, but it will come up as a different phone number. Google Voice also has a "Do Not Disturb" setting, and it can send your voicemail messages to your email so you have a written record of it. When you get an incoming call from Google Voice, you can set it to tell you who is calling before you answer the phone. I love Google Voice because it makes me feel comfortable enough to share that number with parents, which ultimately, makes communication so much easier than using *67 on everyone.

Okay, back to those beginning-of-the-year phone calls.

If you are teaching at the elementary level, you probably already call every parent every year just like Harry says you should. Personally, I have almost 150 students, and the idea of calling all of them is, to put it lightly, panic-inducing. That being said, there are a few strategies I use to make it less stressful and time-consuming.

First, I'm making a shortlist of parents I think I need to speak to. I actually lucked out this year. They moved me up a grade, so I know more than 50% of my students. That lets me focus on calling parents of the kids I don't know, especially one's with poor grades for the third and fourth marking periods. There are a few returning students whose parents I'm going to call as well. Anyone who just dropped off the face of the earth during remote learning or parents I ended up calling a lot at the end of the year. Lastly, my Google Form gives my returning parents the option to opt-in to a phone call from me if they want to, so I will call those who ask me to.

If you still think you want to touch base with everyone, here's my favorite little phone hack: Slydial. Remember before I said to get cell numbers instead of home numbers? This is why. Slydial sends you straight to voicemail as long as it's a cellphone number. Their phone doesn't actually ring. You can use this for so many things. One, you can use it to call parents and leave a welcome message — it'll take half the time to call everyone if it's just a voicemail. Two, I've had some parents "overshare" when I called home during remote learning. Slydial is a good way to update those parents on smaller things without getting into a long, overly personal conversation. Overall, Slydial can save you from a lot of parent contact headaches.

Keeping Parents Up-To-Date

Over the course of the school year, it's going to be important to keep parents up-to-date and involved. Everyone tends to be on board in the beginning, but as the school year wears on, some parents tend to be less involved with school. Here are a few ways to keep them updated and involved.

Remind & Text Messaging

For small reminders or updates, I use the Remind app to keep in touch with parents, but I've found in more time-sensitive situations, the most successful form of contact I've had with parents is texting them. I really only use direct text messaging if the kid doesn't show up to remote learning that day. It's quicker, less invasive, and has better results than email.

Mass Emailing Programs

This is a new one for me. After all the chaos of parent contact last spring, I realized it's almost impossible to talk to parents as much as I needed to, and I was honestly spending hours contacting parents and recording attempted contacts. New year; new me. Work smarter, not harder.

Enter Yet Another Mail Merge (YAMM). YAMM is a Google Sheet extension that is going to save your life this year. YAMM is a mass emailing program. It's the same thing companies use to send you personalized marketing emails with your name and recent purchases. You create a template email, and the program can fill in any personalized information you want it to by using Google Sheets. No more editing the same email fifteen times and forgetting to change a pronoun, or worse, a name 🤦. YAMM does everything for you. And YAMM records the exact time and date you attempted to contact on the Google Sheet for you. No more tedious record taking.

There are a lot of different uses for this extension. You can use it to email about missing work or update parents on grades (I know they could just check Powerschool, but let's face it - a lot of parents don't). You can use it to update parents on a student's use of accommodations or responses to behavior modifications. The really nice thing about it is you can even set it up to automatically generate and email parents on a certain day. So if you can update parents daily, weekly, monthly, etc.

Guardians on Google Classroom

Another way to keep parents in the loop is to add them all as "guardians" on Google Classroom. The guardian feature lets parents know about announcements, assignments, and missing work. The only I don't like about it is it doesn't update parents on graded work, so they will have to look at your school's grade book or your emails for that. This really helps deflect parent comments like, "He didn't tell me there was a project due!" or "She told me she was turning in her work. How was I supposed to know she wasn't'?" Google Classroom tells them all of that for you.

Creating Positive Expectations Together

Lastly, I want to include parents in creating positive expectations for my students. Wong talks a lot about how children respond to praise more than punishment. If parents never know about the good things their child is doing, they can't praise them for it.

Positive Parent Calls

Positive parent phone calls are so important, yet they always seem to be the thing that gets forgotten about when the school year starts ramping up. I plan to call at least a couple of parents every week to let them know about positive, exemplary behavior. By the end of the month, I'll have some candidates to pick from for my monthly Student Spotlight.

Sharing Goals & Progress

In the first week of school, my students are writing goals as six-word memoirs. This is to give them some sort of mantra to carry throughout the school year. Over the course of the year, my students will reflect on their mantra and progress in short writing assignments, and I want to involve parents in this.

Their first assignment is to write about how their parents & their teachers can support their goal or mantra, and then share that assignment with their parents. As students make progress with their goal, I will update parents with positive calls or sharing writing reflections. This will help create support at home and in the classroom — which helps make the students' goals real.

Good Luck!

This year might be the most challenging of our entire careers. Realistically, nothing could prepare us for teaching in 2020, and all we can do is continue to adjust as things change. We don't have to reinvent the wheel to provide our students with positive, effective learning experiences; we just need to adapt what we already know to the new environment.

All summer I've been struggling to really see my classroom — to visualize how it will all go. I hope reflecting on Harry Wong's The First Days of School with me has helped you start to picture your hybrid or remote classroom in a way that makes it real to you. I think I'm finally starting to see my classroom through the fog.

Lastly, always remember: If anyone can adapt to the chaos of working through a pandemic, it's teachers. We are badasses and don't ever let anyone tell you differently.

Stay strong. Stay safe.