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Professional Development Opinion

How Can We Build Trust Between Parents & Teachers?

By Larry Ferlazzo — March 14, 2012 1 min read
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Kanwal Sachdeva asks:

I enjoyed reading your article on ‘how to make students learn to listen’. My question is- How do we make parents to listen to the teachers? You know, for the students who need more help, the parents are not available to talk or they will not really listen. How do we make them understand teacher’s perspective and not believe everything that the student is saying? How do we build that trust?

Parent engagement is a critical piece in creating a successful learning environment. Thanks for raising this important issue, Kanwal!

Of course, an important way to start building that trust is for we teachers to also try to understand the parent’s perspective. I would suggest that this “two-way” street could be a critical difference between parent engagement and parent involvement. I’ll be sharing more about these approaches in my response next week.

Please share your ideas in the comments, or, if you prefer, feel free to email them to me.

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The opinions expressed in Classroom Q&A With Larry Ferlazzo are strictly those of the author(s) and do not reflect the opinions or endorsement of Editorial Projects in Education, or any of its publications.