The Parent Teacher Face Off

Since writing a guest post on the Montessori Method at Deborah Stewart’s Excellence in Early Childhood Education, I’ve been thinking it would be interesting to look at early childhood education from various perspectives. When I chatted with Deborah, our discussion back then was to have a short series of early childhood education-themed posts which looks at both a teacher and parent perspective when it comes to early childhood education. I think there’s still potential to develop thet series of posts. I may be interested developing: 1) Difficulties of establishing an early childhood system at a playgroup level, and 2) Challenges for the parent to stay relevant while the child is in school.

The Parent Teacher Face Off

You’re with your child at the first day of school. You’ve dropped him off successfully – meaning you’ve dealt with the heart-in-your-mouth anxiety and you both didn’t create too big a scene. Now do you hear that sound? No, it’s not your sniffles …

It’s the sound of silence.

For three or four years you’ve been the centre of your child’s existence. You’ve guided, nurtured, fed, clothed, and held his hand. Now you’ve taken a leap of faith and put him in someone else’s care. And for the life of you you have no clue of what he’s doing for a good part of the day. No idea of the plans that are used to guide him. No idea of how he’s performing on a day to day level. You try and figure out what he’s doing at school, but beyond the “I don’t know,” or “I forgot” you might get only drips of information which are really heavily-edited-one-liners and present pretty much nothing regarding his true classroom antics.

Of course, you will hang out for the parent teacher interview, schedule ad-hoc chats with his teacher, and might pour over his work closely. In our school, we have orientation evenings which ran through aspects of the entire syllabus (like a Math night) from when they start to middle school – which I thoroughly enjoy.

All this is good, don’t get me wrong, but I started to lose touch with his intellectual progress. It’s true, he was doing well at school and the occasional glimpses we’d get about his progress made us proud. But to tell you the truth I had effectively abdicated my role as his teacher and guide, and I didn’t have a close eye on his academic progress.

It took an event to get me out of my inertia, and I posted on this in School and Right-Sizing Lessons. Simply speaking, he wasn’t being challenged sufficiently in school and we were noticing boredom at every turn. So what I did was to try and benchmark where he was, what syllabus he was following, and figure out what options to pursue. I made a trip to a bookshop to look through the syllabus for years 3-6, came up with a plan to benchmark his math and english ability, and of course tried to understand the possible options available for him (see Primary School Maths – Should I Push My Child).  The result of this was that I once again rekindled our intellectual relationship, developed a better rapport with his teachers, and helped him regain his footing with school and the activities out of school he engages in.

Here are some thoughts for questions parents can ask if they might like to develop an equally good intellectual relationship with their children and to work hand in hand with teachers:

1. What is your child expected to learn?
2. How is he coping with the material?
3. What subjects is he good at?
4. What material does he have difficulty with?
5. Are there supplementary activities you can engage in to help him out?
6. Are there online applications or off-the-shelf software that may support him?
7. How can you make learning fun and entertaining?
8. How and when are you evaluating his progress?
9. What evaluation methods are used by his teachers?
10. Are you all being too harsh on the poor child? Ease up! Return with fresh eyes!

The last tip, and something that I will chat about with his teachers in the upcoming parent teacher interview next month is to get the teachers to overview material being taught so that he might be able to ‘sell’ those high level concepts to me, rather than try to describe the content by the procedures or processes. Can you imagine trying to figure out long division by hearing a description of the processes to divide a number? OMG. What a nightmare.

Good luck in building a great partnership with your child and your child’s teachers!

See a follow up article by Montessori Teacher Deb Chitwood titled ‘Preschool and Parent Communication.’ At time of publishing, this article appeared in the Deb Hodgkin Daily.

Check out the other Favourite Education Posts on SuperParents.

Links

• Parent Teacher Interview
• Private School Perth
• Children Learning a Language
• Even Parents Can Get Bullied

–
Colin Wee
Supporting Parents Caught in the Middle Between Young Children and Aging Adult Dependents
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