MillennialChild.com

Helping Your Child's Teacher to Communicate / 2

Other Communications 

1.      The teacher should provide parents with hours in which she can be reached by phone at home.  Please respect those hours; teachers need a home life, too. 

2.      In the first three grades, help your child’s teacher create a class newsletter.  Items might include notes about current main lessons, class events, parent gatherings, advice on seasonal activities, poems and songs that the class in learning.

3.      Help your school create a handbook with addresses and phone numbers of the whole parent body, school guidelines and policies, etc.

Parent Evenings

 1.      In the first three grades, there should be four parent evenings a year; after that, three meetings may be sufficient.

 2.      Meetings should begin and end promptly — 7:30 to 9:30 is a good time span.  If a parent asks an important question at 9:29 (which is not uncommon), the teacher should invite those who wish to pursue this question to stay on to discuss it, but announce that the scheduled meeting has ended.  If parents experience meetings going overtime again and again, they will stop coming, as well they should!

 3.      In every meeting, one of the class’s specialist teachers should appear to make a presentation about the subject she is teaching, and to answer questions concerning her classes.

 4.      Meetings should have three or four segments, which may include:

·        An on-going presentation of the developmental stage at which the class stands — this, after all, is the foundation upon which Waldorf teaching rests.

·        A description of the main lesson blocks covered since the last meeting.

·        An opportunity for parents to have a “hands-on” experience of a subject, e.g., painting, form drawing, eurythmy, Spanish, math etc.

·        A presentation by a specialist teacher.

·        A discussion of the class’s social challenges, and the way in which the teachers are meeting them.

·        At least half an hour for questions.

 5.      All of the children’s recent class work should be on display.  Parents would do well to circulate around the room, to see their own child’s work in the context of the whole class.  In the absence of letter or numerical grades, this is the only way to judge “where the child stands” in a Waldorf setting. 

6.      Don’t judge a class teacher’s effectiveness in the classroom on the basis of her parent evenings.  After all, she has chosen to be a teacher of children, not of adults, and the presence of the parent body may be intimidating.  A person who is stiff or forgetful or boring when standing before adults may actually be vital and inspiring when placed before a group of children!

Next Page>>