6 Types of Teachers

Recruiting, Retaining, and Mentoring the Best

Todd Whitaker, Douglas Fiore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317925781
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book helps you sharpen your ability to hire better teachers for your school, improve the ones who are already there, and keep your best and brightest on board.

Section V

The Impact of Other Stakeholders

12

Supporting Teachers in Parent Interactions

Perhaps one of the most challenging aspects of being a teacher is dealing with difficult parents. Although the best teachers in your school probably spend less time doing this than others, at one time or another every teacher has to deal with a difficult parent. This fact represents one more opportunity for school leaders to enhance the work life of their best teachers. By training teachers in techniques that minimize the likelihood of encounters with difficult parents, and by appropriately mediating between difficult parents and teachers, principals provide a great service that will lead to a better perception of teaching as a career in which to remain.

Cheers or Boos

Before we continue, we must emphasize one point. The best way for a teacher to minimize the frequency of interactions with difficult parents is to be a superstar. Although this will not eliminate all of the difficult parents, it will certainly reduce the number of encounters with them in any given school year. The best teachers, those who consistently show care and concern for children, have far fewer difficult parents to deal with than their less effective colleagues. This makes sense; just look at sports teams for an analogy. The home crowd rarely boos the teams that consistently win. This is true even if the players all earn millions of dollars. However, if a player who is squeezing the payroll with a 20-million-dollar salary consistently fails to perform, people start booing.

Great teachers rarely draw boos from the crowd. But because they care so much, they worry about every boo they hear. This is why principals must make every effort to assist them in dealing with difficult parents. We must protect our superstars from unwarranted booing. We also need to remember that an Irreplaceable teacher, accustomed to cheers, will most likely be troubled by even one boo among a throng of cheers. Principals should anticipate this and be ready to help these teachers remember the hundreds of cheers they have received.

Soothing the Savage Beast

In Dealing with Difficult Parents: And with Parents in Difficult Situations (Whitaker & Fiore, 2001), we set forth several techniques for responding to angry, uncooperative, and/or belligerent parents. First, however, we set the stage by delving into the steps that all schools should take to improve parents’ perceptions and thus reduce negative interactions. Rather than summarize all of these techniques and skim through a long list of methods out of context, in Section V we aim to provide an overall understanding of the most important elements. Finally, we emphasize the essential requirement that principals do all they can to make teachers feel supported in parent interactions. At the end of this chapter, we explain the subtle differences between being supported and feeling supported.

Although all teachers would benefit greatly from training in the techniques and ideas described in the following sections, we need to keep our attention focused on our best teachers. These teachers—the ones we care most about retaining—want positive relationships with all parents. Even though the best teachers do everything in their power to foster positive relationships, difficult parents can still get the best of them on occasion. We offer the following suggestions to soothe these savage beasts.

Never let ‘em see you sweat. It is important to appear confident and self-assured whenever you are dealing with a belligerent person. In other words, it’s important not to give this difficult person any reason to think that she has gotten the best of you or he has made you nervous. Despite your best efforts, though, your voice may become shaky after a confrontation with an angry parent. One of the best ways to combat this is to lower your voice. Teachers with great classroom management skills can confirm that lowering one’s voice does more than just hide nervousness. It also helps point out to the angry, loud person just how loud his or her voice is.

Look ‘em in the eye. Similarly, when confronted by an angry or belligerent person, we often automatically look down. Because one of our goals is to appear confident, we need to do just the opposite and look the person in the eye. Studies have shown that maintaining strong eye contact often reduces the other person’s anger. At the very least, maintaining eye contact demonstrates that you are listening and that you care about what the other person is saying. The best teachers in our school will readily accept this; “caring” is their middle name.

“Sorry” seems to be the hardest word. There is an old saying that the best way to have the last word is to apologize. Our best teachers, though they make the fewest mistakes, apologize regularly. These conscientious teachers routinely apologize for even the slightest errors or misperceptions. Now, we’ve all been in situations when we know an apology would go very far with difficult parents, but we just don’t believe that we’ve done anything wrong. For these occasions, we train teachers to say, “I am sorry that happened.” This doesn’t mean admitting any guilt or taking the blame for something the teacher didn’t do. In reality, the teacher is sorry that the situation happened, whatever it was. For example, if a teacher punishes a child for talking during a test, and the parent calls to complain, the best teachers really are sorry that the situation happened. Although the punishment was warranted, and even necessary, the teacher is sorry because now a parent and a child are upset. Remember, our best teachers don’t like to see people upset. So the teacher expresses sympathy, and the parent hears an apology, yet the integrity of the teacher’s actions is maintained—all because the teacher knows how to use the simple phrase, “I am sorry that happened.”

Why didn’t I know? Although the best teachers in our schools are generally masters at managing their classroom learning environment, now and then the administration may have to take part in handling a student disruption or habitual offense of a classroom rule. In these situations, we must avoid a common pitfall; we must not allow something to escalate to the point of the principal’s involvement without ever having let the parent know. Obviously, in some cases an office referral is swift and immediate. We’re not referring to those situations here. But if a student’s misbehavior or lack of responsibility has gradually escalated to the point where the principal is called in, parents usually ask, “Why didn’t I know about this?” This question is more difficult to answer than it is to forestall. To assist teachers in maintaining positive relationships with parents, we need to remind them to stay focused on strong communication skills. They should notify parents early on if a student is having difficulty. This not only helps to avoid the difficult question, “Why didn’t I know?” but also helps to establish the teacher as a strong communicator. Parents see this in a positive light, and good communication may even reduce the teacher’s number of encounters with difficult parents in the first place.

Staff Development Focused on Parents

One of the best ways to assist teachers in dealing with parents is to educate them about parents and family life in modern times. Just as parents incorrectly perceive some of what happens in schools and then complain about situations that they don’t really understand, educators sometimes incorrectly perceive family life and the challenges facing contemporary parents. It’s important to remember that, for the most part, educators come from good families with fewer difficulties. Although teachers do not escape their share of tragedies and challenges, the majority of our teachers come from stable home environments free of serious economic difficulties.

Although there is never any excuse for parents to be rude, belligerent, or disrespectful, we do think that it’s helpful for educators to know some of the reasons why parents can behave this way. As Stephen Covey reminds us, we should seek first to understand and then to be understood.

Presented briefly and in sketchy detail, here are points school leaders should share with teachers as part of a staff development program focusing on understanding and cooperating with parents. For greater detail, see Dealing with Difficult Parents: And with Parents in Difficult Situations (Whitaker & Fiore, 2001).

♦ In 1940, fewer than 9% of all women with children worked outside the home.

♦ Recently, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 78% of women with children between the ages of 6 and 16 were in the labor force.

♦ Girls with positive paternal involvement are three times less likely to become teenage mothers.

♦ Boys with positive paternal involvement are less likely to grow up unemployed, incarcerated, or uninvolved with their own children.

♦ The U.S. Bureau of the Census (1999) reports that 5.6% of U.S. children under the age of 18 are living with their grandparents. Of these, 36% have no parents present in this household. These 1,417,000 children have only their grandparents to rely on for care.

♦ In 1998, the number of American children under the age of 18 who lived in poverty was 14.5 million (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1999).

♦ In families with a female head of household and no husband present, 41% of the children live in poverty.

Although these bits of information focus exclusively on the changes in family dynamics that have taken place in recent years, teachers must understand that we do not offer these facts as a means of judging parents today. The information simply serves to show that life is more stressful for many people than it used to be. This realization does not make it acceptable for parents to be difficult, but it does offer teachers an opportunity to view parents a bit more compassionately.

Furthermore, parents today have much more exposure than ever before to misconceptions about our schools—a fact that may help to explain why so many of them are difficult to deal with. Consider two books that reported very strong sales in recent years: How Parents Can Save America’s Failing Schools (Pierce, 2002) and Bad Teachers: The Essential Guide for Concerned Parents (Strickland, 1998). In fairness to the authors, these books do not target schools or teachers. Their titles, however, can lead some parents to believe that our schools are in trouble; they could be considered a call to arms for parents who need to save our troubled schools. Principals who share this information with teachers may help them to understand why some parents are difficult and may lessen the stress that these teachers feel when having to deal with them.

Do They Feel Supported?

We have spoken with many school principals who report that one of the most important parts of their job is to support teachers. This is particularly true when working with parents. Teachers say they want support, and principals invariably state that it’s important for them to support teachers. We think that a key point is missing here: Supporting teachers is important, but what’s really important is making teachers feel supported. That’s why it’s so essential for principals to be aware of people’s perceptions. As building principals, we always felt that it was our responsibility to make our best teachers feel supported in their interactions with parents and others. When teachers knew that we were always available, they could come to us with concerns, and we would listen and offer requested advice so that they felt supported. This feeling was comforting to teachers, and we believe it made them more willing to take risks and communicate openly with others. Had the teachers not felt supported, they would have been much less likely to share difficult information with parents, even when this needed to happen. Nobody wants to have a difficult conversation without knowing someone will back them if things become challenging.

The best news in all of this is that your Irreplaceables are pretty easy to support. Because we really need to focus on retaining our best teachers, and because this chapter deals with the major challenge of relationships with parents, isn’t it comforting to realize that your best teachers will be easier to support in this regard? Parents respect your best teachers. Your best teachers usually do the right thing with students. Making these teachers feel your support is not a difficult thing to do.

The importance of helping teachers feel supported should not overshadow the need to support teachers whenever possible. All those principals who believe that supporting teachers is a critical component of success are correct. However, these principals would be better served to remember that teachers should feel supported even when the principal may not fully support the teacher’s actions. The feeling of support is a critical component of teacher retention because the best teachers are less likely to continue working in an environment in which they do not feel supported.

13

Nurturing Student—Teacher Relationships

Ask any great teacher, “W...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Meet the Authors
• Table of Contents
• Section I The Keyword Is Quality
• Section II Why Teachers Leave
• Section III
• Section IV
• Section V The Impact of Other Stakeholders
• References