Speak with authority when you meet with parents - you know your stuff.
<h2><em>Last week NAPLAN results were released. Adam Voigt woke to judgement of teachers, once again, and filmed an encouraging video reminding teachers to switch off to the self-appointed &#8220;experts&#8221; and back themselves. Here he explains what we can do to make sure parents are listening to teachers instead of the radio.</em></h2>
<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nsh9No7V6KE">Here&#8217;s the video if you missed it</a></p>
<p><strong>Why parents listen to shock jocks more than you</strong></p>
<p><strong>By Adam Voigt</strong></p>
<p>The cult of expertise that’s flooding across the national schools conversation concerns me. It seems that, these days, anybody who has walked past a school in the last three or four decades is fully qualified to comment on your decisions, your craft, your technical skill, and your capability to complete the task of educating.</p>
<p>I often make the joke that if merely using the system (even as a student a looooong time ago) qualifies you fully as an educational expert &#8211; then surely using a toilet qualifies you as a plumber! Further, this subjective criticism seems to be more pointed and acute for teachers than for any other profession. You wouldn’t tell your doctor how to fix your injured knee, you wouldn’t tell your lawyer how to build her concluding remarks to a jury and you wouldn’t tell your mechanic the only way you wish your car to be serviced. You trust their expertise. And above all the petty squabbles over the minutiae of what is happening at schools, it’s that absence of trust at the root of this problem. So how do we begin the task of winning back the position of trusted advisors so that when a prominent shock jock speaks up on the edu-issue of the week, we don’t come under attack?</p>
<p>I’d contend there are four key things that we can do to at least sneak us past the Alan Jones and Steve Prices of the airwaves:</p>
<p><strong>1) Communicate through non-traditional means.</strong></p>
<p>What works for the shock jocks is that they have a captive audience for the school run or the trip home from work. Your school or class newsletter doesn’t achieve that. But what does get their attention is their pride and joy… their children. Could you send home a video of the class work focus of the week starring your students? Could you run a weekday webinar (recorded for those who can’t attend) about how parents can help learning at home? Could you move on from print communication being your default means?</p>
<p><strong>2) Talk about your purpose and your expertise.</strong></p>
<p>Eliminate from your key communicative devices all operational aspects that be found out in other easy ways (such as TiqBiz). Talk about pedagogy (and use the word!), talk about learning outcomes, talk about contemporary learning approaches, talk about ICT integration, and discuss how you are explicitly working with parents to build empathetic and successful citizens out of their children.</p>
<p><strong>3) Get ahead of the game.</strong></p>
<p>Ensure that your parents have heard multiple messages from you about your responses to poor behaviour choices, bullying, instructional style and your intentions for parental involvement … before the you-know-what hits the fan. At crisis point, parents become emotional and we say some outrageous, destructive, and unproductive things when under duress if we don’t have the information already in our heads to refer to. If there are no surprises when these challenges arise, then we’re far more likely to have them on our side.</p>
<p><strong>4) Speak to the future.</strong></p>
<p>As many parents are referencing their questions on a very outdated view of what the educative purpose is, it’s important to make distinctions between what school was for back then and what it’s actually for now. The Institute (University of Phoenix) has released a ‘Work Skills 2020’ report, which detailed the ten skills our kids will need. They include sense making, social intelligence, novel and adaptive thinking, cross-cultural competency, computational thinking, new-media literacy, transdisciplinarity, design mindset, cognitive load management and virtual collaboration. These are particularly handy hooks and justifications for why a child’s educative experience needs to be very different to the one we all had. They make the differences in your approach to previous approaches far more valid. And they make you sound outrageously clever too – so thanks ITFT!</p>
<p>In a nutshell, our parents are paying more attention to the voice on the wireless than to ours because of the authority with which that voice speaks. That authority doesn’t come from years of expertise, from mountains of research or from synthesising and evaluating contemporary approaches. That authority is a choice – they’ve chosen it for themselves. Your positioning as an authority, as a trusted advisor and as an expert is a choice too. And that choice, that confidence, needs to shine through in your communications to parents more than any mundane, operational task.</p>

		<div class="box shadow aligncenter" style="width:85%">
			<div class="box-inner-block">
				<span class="fa tie-shortcode-boxicon"></span>
<p><strong>THE CHEAT SHEET</strong></p>
<p>Don’t have time to soak in the whole article today? Here’s the big points …</p>
<ol>
<li>Choose to be an education authority for yourself.</li>
<li>Use tech and your students to communicate.</li>
<li>Comment on the big stuff of schools.</li>
<li>Get ahead of the potential crisis points.</li>
<li>Speak to future employability factors.</li>
</ol>

			</div>
		</div>
	

		<div class="box shadow aligncenter" style="width:85%">
			<div class="box-inner-block">
				<span class="fa tie-shortcode-boxicon"></span>
<p><strong>AITSL STANDARDS FOR PRINCIPALS…</strong> and you addressed them by reading!</p>
<p>The Big One</p>
<p>3.7 Engage parents/ carers in the educative process.</p>
<p>But also …</p>
<p>1.2 Understand how students learn.</p>
<p>3.5 Use effective classroom communication.</p>
<p>7.3 Engage with the parents</p>

			</div>
		</div>
	

A study investigating the realities of out-of-field teachers is seeking participants for groundbreaking research.
The resources are designed to support teachers to make sure all students are engaged in…
Tic disorders are far more common than many people realise, and are often misrepresented in…
The school library has long been a place of discovery, reflection, and learning. But as…
Is your school an inclusive community that empowers students to recognise bullying and to stand…
Performance indicators for the education and VET sectors have just been released with some encouraging…
This website uses cookies.