http://www.whiteswanfoundation.org/article/the-parent-teacher-connection/

Effective parent - teacher communication is key to helping children who struggle in school.

Padma Shastry

The teacher and parents are the adults that have the closest connection with children under their care. They have the greatest impact on the child’s life and education. A strong and cooperative relationship between parent and teacher would be ideal for a student to blossom.

However, when a student experiences difficulties in school, this relationship is tested. These difficulties might be academic, medical, social or behavioural in nature. It usually falls to the teacher to navigate the situation gingerly. One scenario might be that the teacher approaches a parent with the student’s issue, and the parent becomes defensive. Another might be that the parent gets aggressive or accusing, and the teacher becomes defensive. Neither of these is helpful in resolving the situation.

For parents, it is traumatic to hear that their child is falling short of their high standards. They need time to process this new information. So it is unrealistic for teachers to expect that parents will accept what’s being told with equanimity and help the teacher to deal with it.

The grieving process

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross was a psychiatrist who studied the grief process and defined the five stages of grief. When parents first learn of their child’s medical, academic, behavioural or other difficulty, they go through a process of grief. This is the grief resulting from the loss of their dream for an ideal life for their child. This can be deep and takes time to come to terms with. It cannot be rushed. Everyone needs their own time to process the negative information.

Here are the five stages of grief that Kubler-Ross described.

1. Denial: The first instinct when we hear anything undesirable is to deny it. “There’s no problem. It’s not an issue.” Parents might disregard, minimize or try to find an alternate explanation for the problem when they are first told about it. A parent at my old school explained that his child was a ‘spirited’ child when told of his behaviour issues. A mother whose child was biting others, reasoned that it was the other children’s fault for provoking her child.
2. Anger: As complaints from teachers continue to mount, denial changes to anger: “My child is not the problem. The teachers and school don’t know how to deal with my child.” This is something I have actually heard from parents. Anger may even be directed at god. To some extent, the fact that a problem exists is acknowledged at this stage. 
3. Bargaining: This is capitulation. “If you keep my child in class/school, I will do whatever is necessary at home to make this work. I’ll arrange for tuitions, etc…” Bargaining with god is also seen, in the form of pilgrimages and promises. There is a greater degree of acceptance at this stage.
4. Depression: This is the stage that is hardest for parents as they finally admit that there is a problem. However, this is passive acceptance. “The sky has fallen on my head” or similar thoughts that make them feel helpless and powerless; the loss of their perfect dream for their child. They are unable to see the options available to make a different version of that dream happen. During this stage, they do not fully engage or participate in their child’s education.
5. Acceptance: This is when parents finally accept that there is a problem, and actively participate with the teacher. They become the teacher’s ally in making the best choices for their child’s progress.

This process happens on a different timeline for every family. There is no set timetable for a parent to reach the stage of acceptance.

I had a student with Down’s Syndrome - which is a congenital condition - in middle school. His mother resorted to litigation in order to keep her child in the mainstream school. He was clearly unable to cope with middle-school-level academics, yet his mother was adamant. She was still at Stage 2 of the grieving process, 13 years after being faced with her son’s condition.

Even within the same family, the husband and wife may deal with it differently. Just last week, I met a child whose father seemed curious about how to help his son, and talked to me on the phone and in person with a lot of questions about his son. He told me that his wife was still angry with her fate and wondered why God had done this to them. Clearly he was at the acceptance stage, while his wife was in the anger stage.

It is also possible that parents are not knowledgeable enough or feel helpless about how to help their child. They might try to disengage completely and hand over all control to teachers and doctors. I have had parents like this as well. When I asked one particular parent about her child’s homework routine, she replied I was supposed to teach her child, not the parents. She told me that’s why she sent her child to school! So no homework for him!

It is important for teachers to remember that they should not take parents’ comments or emotions personally. It is usually not directed at them; it is the parent’s way of going through the process. One parent brought her daughter back after an extended overseas family trip. The student had missed a significant amount of syllabus. When I told her that her daughter would have to do extra work to catch up in the next few weeks, she told me it was my responsibility and she couldn’t help with homework or afterschool study. She said it was my job!

Parents are highly emotionally tied to their children. Teachers, on the other hand, have the advantage of being able to be objective. They can view the situation purely from the viewpoint of facts. But parents do not have this mind set at the start of the process. It would behoove teachers to have patience while parents wend their way through their emotions.

I’ve had parents ask me why their child wasn’t reading like other kids, and when he would be able to read. It is very hard to explain to such parents that the same benchmarks cannot be applied to their child.

While waiting for parents to accept the situation feels like a kindness towards them, teachers get anxious about waiting to get help for the child. Precious time is lost in the process of acceptance, and teachers might want to push the issue. This has to be handled gently and with compassion towards the parents’ feelings. It is a perfectly valid point that the child has to be assessed and interventions started as early as possible in order to minimize worsening of the problem. However valid it may be though, teachers definitely cannot bypass the parents and their emotions along the way. It would not help the cause of the student if parents and teachers got into an antagonistic relationship.

Here are some tips for teachers to talk to parents:

• Talk to parents in a quiet, private place.
• Keep a pleasant welcoming demeanour.
• Do not stop after explaining the problem. Have some solutions ready as well. Give them some resources, informational pamphlets, names of support personnel, and most importantly, a filled out referral form explaining the situation that parents can take to their resource person.
• Do not introduce your emotions into the conversation. Be as objective as possible.
• State the facts (behaviours, concerns, etc) in a neutral manner, without judgement.
• Use specifics in the conversation, without editorializing or exaggerating. Say, “Student asks to go the bathroom three times every period.” instead of “His constant interruptions drive me crazy.”
• Listen to the parents and if possible, try to implement some of their ideas in your classes.
• Have an agenda for the meeting and take meeting notes. Identify action items that you and the parents plan to work on before your next meeting. Set a date for a follow-up meeting. (These kinds of problems rarely get resolved in one meeting; meeting notes are a way of maintaining continuity between all personnel who are involved with the student)
• Keep talking to the parents gently even if they seem resistant. Do not give up.
• Remember, parents have the best interests of their child at heart, and are the greatest influence on the child. They are your allies in the education of the child.

Padma Shastry is a Special Educator and currently the Director of Samam Vidya, Bangalore.

ALSO READ

Explore

Overcoming AddictionCaregivingPreventing SuicideCommon DisordersYoga and mental health

Between B & W

Featured Video

Let's Talk Mental Health – Mental Health in India

Theater as a Teaching Tool

Theater as a Teaching Tool for Students with Special Needs

            I am a special education teacher at a public middle school. Most of my students have mild learning difficulties. Some are also autistic, while others may have orthopedic impairments, vision or hearing problems. The students who attend our school come from mostly blue-collar backgrounds. Many are also first-generation immigrants, and consequently classified as English language learners. All these needs put my students at a disadvantage, when it comes to academic success.

            Many of my students’ socio-economic situations are such that they get relatively little support at home for academics. Either their parents don’t have sufficient education to help them, or their lifestyle and job requirements preclude such support. Many parents work multiple jobs to make ends meet. They have trouble attending after-school meetings with teachers or information meetings about school programs due to job or child-care issues. Many don’t have a computer or internet access at home, hence cannot access technology based lessons from home. All this implies that, while my students may be getting a whole lot of real-world learning at home, their academic education has to take place at school.

            Today’s economy has not affected just families adversely. It has caused our school district to reallocate limited funds away from the arts, in favor of core academics. It’s the reality of the times. Our school did have a drama program; now it’s an after-school fee-based class. We still have a school band and orchestra, and an art class. Other schools have similar issues have dealt with them in ways that are similarly less than ideal.

            The benefit of drama for students with special needs has been well documented. It is an important tool for children with autism. Autistic students have trouble reading faces, understanding emotions and interacting socially. Theater arts help them in all these areas. Students who have trouble with expressive language also benefit from theater arts. When students have trouble expressing themselves, they do better when presented with parameters and a framework in which to express themselves. Carol Grey is a prominent autism researcher who developed the concept of social stories to provide autistic children with direct instruction about how to handle any social situation. It uses enactment of the social situation that is being taught. Such tools are great for any student with processing disorders. They remember better when they have enacted a scene ahead of time and know what is expected of them.

            I use an acting-based lesson occasionally. The demands and rigors of sticking to an academic program and a pacing calendar make it hard for us to take the time to stretch our creative muscles. One of the standards for my grade-level is a performance standard; so we choose a short play with few characters and practice for a few days. We then visit another class and present our play to an audience. This is one of our most interesting assignments in the whole year. Some students are shy and resist speaking up; others want to be the center of attention. Some dyslexic students have difficulty reading the lines, but have developed coping skills. They just memorize their lines. It is interesting to see how they work through this assignment. They have a blast creating the props, painting and gluing them. It is loosely structured time where they get to practice their social skills. They enjoy it and I wish we could do more such activities. Other teachers in our school also use theater-based lessons in their classes. One of the teachers goes a step further and has students come up with their own script for a certain social situation. Teachers also arrange field trips to play productions by theater groups to teach appropriate audience behavior- when to applaud, to talk in whispers, etc.

            One class in our school district that uses theater in a substantial way is the social pragmatics program. This is a class for high-functioning autistic children who have trouble with social interactions. Carol Grey’s social stories incorporate the theater arts into the curriculum to teach social interactions. Students read about appropriate social behaviors and then watch them being played by other actors. They then act it out themselves and practice their skills. The social pragmatics curriculum focuses on reading other peoples’ faces and emotions as well as on how the students convey their feelings to their audience.

             

            

Soft Skills are an Education too

In the past couple of days, two people referred to the practice of social promotion, or age-based promotion, as a less-than-ideal practice. As a teacher I have mostly advocated for my students to be advanced to the next grade.

A commonly cited reason for holding students back is that they haven’t mastered the academic material. “How does a student reach 6^th without knowing multiplication tables?” But this would only be true if the sole reason for attending school was to master academics. While academics might be the primary reason to go to school, it is only one of many reasons that we want students to attend school.

Students, especially struggling students, need age-appropriate social interactions and models to show them how to interact with each other. Also, the classroom teaches many soft skills that we tend to discount the value of. Social interaction (interacting with different groups- peers, adults, authority figures, the opposite sex, support personnel), accepting failure and loss gracefully (sports and other contests), teamwork and project management (group projects) are just some of the life skills that students learn in school that they need for adulthood and employment.

Anybody who discounts the value of these soft skills hasn’t waited endlessly for a tailor or contractor, who has changed the due date 4 times already, to get their order finished. Or watched pavers lay a road, and telecom workers tear it up the following day. Or watched graceless celebrities pander to their petty natures and wrangle with each other in public.

In the age of the internet, knowledge is cheap, and doesn’t hold the value it once held when scribes lovingly and with great urgency copied texts by hand to preserve and disseminate information. Its very ubiquity has decreased the urgency of acquiring information. While academic knowledge is a huge necessity for the college-bound, it is of much less impact for the other section of the student body. Age-appropriate soft skills acquisition is the very thing that such struggling students need, and this can only be accomplished within a group of peers. When they demonstrate weakness in one area, then it becomes even more important to bolster their skills in the other area.

Besides, do I really want my 14 year old daughter on a school campus with 19 year old boys? We need to give students the skills they need, not what we decide they need, at the appropriate age.

After all, no tailor needs to know the name of the element with atomic weight 28. He or she does, however, need to be able to plan sufficiently well in order to estimate the pick-up date for his customer. And, curiously, the same student who never mastered his multiplication tables, can now magically figure out the cost of tailoring four blouses. 

The Invisibles

It is easier for us to respond somewhat sympathetically to people with visible disabilities- blindness, profound deafness, wheelchair-bound, intellectual disabilities, or other conditions for which a visual inspection suffices to tell us that the person has a disability. Whether or not we are truly helpful, we at least try to make certain minimum humane accommodations. We certainly don’t have the expectation that a wheelchair-bound person will walk, or a blind person will drive.

Yet we routinely have such expectations for our struggling students in school. We expect them to memorize their multiplication tables, long poems, work multi-step Math algorithms, learn non-phonetic spelling, or write five paragraph essays, when they have clearly and repeatedly tried and demonstrated that they can’t.

And then they are labeled as either lazy or stupid. Remedies vary- parents might arrange for after-school tuition, may shame the child for ‘bringing a bad name’ to the parents, may even beat him. Teachers will ignore and give up on such a student. They have enough to do, and can’t afford to spend time on a ‘lazy’ student. I met a few students who were asked to leave their school. Not only do we not help them, we heap abuse on them. A unique problem of this set of students. 

There is a fallacious assumption that the child is underperforming just to be ‘bad’ or to annoy the teacher. Teachers and parents will assign various motives to the student; yet they don’t even consider that the child may be underperforming because he clearly cannot do the work. If a student has a learning disability, it is unrealistic to expect that the child will improve with more of the same kind of teaching, yelling at him or her, blaming their parents, shaming or ignoring.

Children want to please adults. It’s very innate. Babies smile at their caregivers, toddlers read their parents’ faces to look for a smile or approval to indicate that they are doing a good job. Many new parents play a game of scowling at their infants and laughing when they cry. (For some reason, this amuses parents; I’ll never understand why…) There was an experiment conducted with toddlers crawling on all fours across the floor. When the floor changed from solid wood to clear glass, they stopped at the edge of the change and looked at their parents faces. If the mom was smiling, they continued assuredly across the floor. If the mom appeared anxious, they stopped. Such is the power of the smile on kids. From such a young age, children want to please adults, get their cues from them, and earn their approval. This trait continues through life- until it is killed by institutional cruelty and apathy. Children do want to please their teachers; but we have to earn their trust by helping them succeed. Would the babies trust their smiling parents if there was no glass floor at all, and they had fallen off the edge of the solid floor?

These chronically struggling students have an established record of underperformance and quickly acquire a reputation as lazy. Older students might have acquired negative behavior patterns as a coping strategy. They may be apathetic, defiant, passive-aggressive, depressed, off-task or distracting. They may play the part of class clown in order to attract negative attention. They embrace these negative personas as a mask to cover up their academic failures. These behaviors are not the cause of their academic problems, but rather the result of continued failure on the part of the teaching establishment to address their needs effectively.

Blind or deaf students, students on the autism spectrum, or with cerebral palsy, etc, have schools that cater to their specific needs. While I don’t necessarily agree with the concept of a segregated education, at least it is acknowledged that a different kind of system needs to be used to educate students with different needs. Students with learning disabilities, on the other hand, don’t fit into any of these schools, nor can they succeed in their regular classes. They are truly invisible, the most under-served section of our students. I feel for them.

Ignoring this section of the school population does have a negative impact on us as a society- it comes back to bite us. These are the students who have sufficient general intelligence to blend into society as adults, yet will have acquired no useful or marketable skills in school. Hence they are underemployed, bitter, and at loose ends. They might be the ones spraying graffiti, getting involved in petty crime, becoming con men, sitting on compound walls, idling with similar friends, winking and whistling at our daughters in the evening hours, and generally being a menace.

It is in our interest as a society to educate every student in our classrooms, not just the smart ones. The smart students can, and will succeed, with or without teachers. They are motivated, and have no processing disorders to hold them back. It is the struggling student who truly needs our help, empathy, skills and time. In him or her lies our true test of teaching, and our humanity.

And, yes, learning disability is a real disability.

Spare the rod…

                During my last visit to India this past summer, there was a news item on TV about a teacher lynching a student with a ruler for making one mistake in his recitation. A lynching- much more than a beating- 63 lashes with a ruler. A hidden camera picked up the action and news outlets beamed it to the world. I was beyond disgusted watching it; it made my stomach turn. Horrified students huddled in their seats, watching their crazed out-of-control teacher beat their classmate. Do you think this helped the student with his recitation?

When I attended school many years ago, teachers hitting students used to happen, but not too frequently. I attended fairly high-performing schools with many upper-middle class families, and while corporal punishment wasn't rampant, it did occur now and then. I would have thought that this practice would have become unfashionable by now. Apparently, not so. Sad to say, it still happens. A parent asked me in disbelieving earnest, “How can you bring up a child without hitting him every now and then?” Getting compliance from a child out of fear does not instill character. After all, character is defined as one’s behavior when no one is watching.

I have been a mother for over 20 years, and a teacher for about a dozen years. I am a teacher of students with special needs and with several aggravating behaviors. Yet I have never felt the need to hit any of them. More to the point, it wouldn't have helped. After all, what am I going to do? Hit a crying child to make him stop crying?

Beating a child is an exercise in futility. The beater is acknowledging that he or she is defeated, and doesn't know any more skills to manage the student. The beater is accepting failure, and using brute power to assert superiority over a child half his age, and probably half his size. (I very much doubt a teacher would pick on a student as tall as himself or herself. Unlike younger kids, I dare say they would defend themselves, physically if necessary.) It is a highly unequal and unfair power relationship, where the teacher is counting on the fact that the student will not defend himself/fight back.

This is just sad. It shows the teacher’s shortcomings more than the student’s. Beating a student every time he makes a mistake on his multiplication tables will not help him to learn multiplication tables. In fact, it will make him more anxious and make him stutter and stammer the next time he has to recite his tables. What is the point?

I realize that teachers don’t use physical punishment as the first step. It only happens after repeated infractions on the student’s part. Agreed. First the teacher tries reteaching the student, then the teacher makes the student stand on the bench, then sends him out of the classroom, then sends him to the office, then calls the parent for a conference and yells at the parent…. Then finally beats him. OK …, then what? Where do you go from there? What is the next stage? The teacher is now out of options.

Seems like teachers beat for two reasons- anger, and frustration. An angry person is a pitiable person who needs mental health help if he is beating kids out of anger.

Beating a student out of frustration- this situation can be helped somewhat. This is frustration felt by the teacher not towards the student, but rather toward oneself. It is frustration felt by the teacher at not having the skills to know how to help. Intensive training and practice in classroom and behavior management can help with this situation.

Physical punishment- and its ugly cousins, verbal abuse, shaming, disrespect- reflect more on the teacher than on the student. “Naach na jaane aangan teda…”

Learning Disabilities- Processing Disorders Simulation lab workshops in India

This Learning Disability- Processing Disorders Simulation Lab workshop was presented to B. Ed students and to in-service general education teachers in India in July and August.

The PowerPoint presentation before the lab activities

Explanation of fine motor simulation activity

Auditory Processing disorder station- participants on headphones



Sample of a participant's Visual Motor Integration (VMI) activity

Some comments:

• Very useful in order to understand the child's difficulties in learning. Useful for the regular classroom teacher to know the child's difficulties. - Sai Lakshmi, SpEd teacher, Pondicherry
• The LD activities set me thinking- I need to make more allowances and modifications. - Teacher, Bangalore
• This training should be included in B. Ed and D. Ed training itself.- Head Mistress, Mysore
• The simulation lab helped me to actually experience and understand the difficulties our children face. It helped me to understand children with LD. I got a clear view of some concepts like modifications and accommodations. - Sanyukta, B. Ed student, Goa

Finnish Wonder

Finnish students do so well in international testing that Finnish teachers are the new model of teaching excellence. It is indeed wonderful that they are so accomplished.

It speaks to the premium placed on education by the Finnish culture that the best students at university level choose teaching as a viable career option. They make a conscious choice to become teachers. This is as opposed to the Indian or the US system where the best university students seem to prefer the financially lucrative technical field, and the remaining graduates drift into teaching. The Indian value system is supposed to value education highly; however this theory is not apparent in our society. A look at the Sunday matrimonial columns will bear out this truth. How many eligible young men and women want to marry teachers?

The Finnish system has intelligent, motivated, educated, respected and well-compensated teachers. This is in contrast to many other educational systems where teachers have minimal specialized training, are unmotivated (teacher absenteeism in government schools in India is supposedly chronic), and inadequately compensated. It might all tie in to the value society places on teachers, lip service aside.

But this is a one-sided look, I think. What about the student body? The Finnish student demographic is much more homogeneous compared to either the American or Indian demographic. Finland, being a socialistic welfare state, ensures that there is a fair amount of social and economic uniformity among its citizens. This would do much to eliminate the teacher-student disconnect. When teachers are from a different socio-economic background from their students, it’s hard to connect with them. I remember telling more than a few parents to check their children’s grades online, until I understood that many of my students don’t happen to have much technology in their homes, among other things….

Immigrant students and second language learners might also be a less pressing concern for Finnish teachers, I imagine. In contrast, almost every year, at least half my students are English Language learners, having emigrated from some other country. Either their parents, or they themselves, were born outside the US. I imagine Indians classrooms must be similar. Maybe children from migrant working families come from adjoining states in search of work, and speak a different language. My students also come from other problems inherent in low-income neighborhoods. Incarcerated parents, hunger, abuse, drugs and crime are fairly common themes in my students’ families. I would imagine some variant of this theme applies in Indian government schools as well. Teaching in such circumstances is hardly ideal.

Indian and American teachers do an excellent job with middle-class homogeneous student populations. Indian students with a private school education immigrate to all parts of the world, and are usually the most successful immigrant group wherever they go. A look at the link between American real estate prices and students’ test scores shows that American teachers do a fine job of educating privileged students pre-primed for success.

Students from economically privileged families and neighborhoods consistently do well on standardized tests. It is not too hard (I would never call teaching an easy job) to teach motivated students who are primed to learn. But how successful would Finnish teachers be in Indian and American public schools, I wonder…?

When administrators transfer comparative performance pressure to classroom teachers, one has to wonder if it is a fair comparison to only compare teachers, while ignoring the student body.

That aside, if I ever had a chance to collaborate with a Finnish teacher in my career, I would value it highly; I dare say I would learn a lot. But then again… they might also learn a thing or two from me.