RE_5539

Lisa,

You're right. We need to get to know the families in our classrooms. If we do, we will be able to connect with the students and motivate them to learn. The school systems need to realize the importance of this and give us time for this. I know we can try to learn about the family through the child or send a questionaire to the parents about their expectations but I believe it must go further than this. We need to be able to go on home visits at the beginning of the year and invite parents into the classrooms as a "Getting to know you" time. When I taught preschool, that's when I felt like I had crossed cultural boundaries. I got to know where my children came from and I also felt like I knew the parents better.

Hi Lisa,
I feel that the impact of this book on each of us has been great! I think the most important thing that we have learned form this book is that we need to know everything we can about each of our students. No longer should we just focus on reading their cumulative folders and talking to past teachers. We must get to know our students and their families. I guess the main question becomes: How is this possible? At a school like mine, I am lucky if half of my students’ parents show up for teacher conferences. To be quite honest, I do not think many of my parents would be happy with a home visit. So, what is the best way to get to know the home lives of our students?

Kelly Mabe

Lisa, we are missing pieces of the puzzles and many teachers try to create their own pieces. What I am saying is that we often speculate about things we do not know. If we do not know about a child’s family or previous educational experiences we tend to come up with our own conclusions of why they are a certain way or do certain things. Yes, we do need to go back to the time of getting to know children and their families. If we can get families to see that we are genuine in our approach and we truly care about their child they will be more willing to help us in this process.
Many children do not see the relevance in what we do today in the classroom. Times have changed and children need to know why they are learning what we are giving them. If not they will be turned off. I like what you said, “it is now my job to entice my children into learning”.
My school had the Ruby Payne training as well due to the population of children we work with. I think Payne and Hicks can do some awesome work together.

Lisa,
I completely agree with you. Teachers must take an active interest in their children's families and backgounds. I have my parents complete three surveys a year (beginning, mid-year, and end). Each survey asks basic questions about their thoughts on reading instruction and their child's progess. It is really interesting to get the feedback! If nothing else, it lets parents know that their opinion counts and I am available and open to learning more about what's important to them.
Like you, I have found the Ruby Payne training to be espcially relevant while taking this course. At my school we had two years worth of workshops on her studies and it certainly gives you a different type of perspective on our students.

Lisa, While reading your blog, I automatically started thinking about teachers going back to doing a home visit at the beginning of the school year. As a brand new teacher, I have yet to even have the opportunity to do this, but I am curious as to what everyone else's view on this is. While it may be time consuming, it seems to me that this would be a great way to start off a year with open communication. It also gives the teacher the opportunity to see the environment that a child comes from and interact with family members who have impacted our students from birth. This even makes me consider offering parent conferences in locations other than the school. Why shouldn't a family be comfortable when discussing the best courses to take to enable their child to succeed in the school setting? Anyone have any thoughts on this? ~Allison Reese

Lisa,

You are so right that we as educators are going to have to take time out to learn our students families and home life. Such insight into our student's histories will help us to do a better job at educating our students.

Danielle, you are so right that we speculate about a child's family or educational experiences. Instead of drawing our own conclusions about a child, we need to look into their histories to find answers.

Allison, I like your idea of holding conferences in different locations to make the parents more comfortable.

Lisa, you made a great point that some students may think the things we are teaching has no purpose to them so we are going to have to incorporate things that entice our students to learn. I haven't had the opportunity to be under Ruby Payne's knowledge, but agree with you that it isn't about us, but about getting to know our students so we can teach them better.

Linda Younts

I too agree that we need to really get to know the families of the children in our classroom. I think with the combination of this and working together to find the best way to educate each child individually in order to better motivate them and help them to become interested in new things beyond the everyday simplicity of their home life. I think it is only wishful thinking that the school systems would even consider giving us time for something like this unless we could show how it directly connected to their test scores! Gosh forbid we do something that isn’t related to improving their achievement scores. I plan to implement a few minutes to one or two classes each week next year to just talking and discussing major issues in the news, or even just things the kids have on their minds. Especially in English class I believe that this would be beneficial so that when they said they didn’t have anything to write about you could remind them you just spent a few minutes talking about something earlier. Overall I think these strategies are glimpses of what the future holds for all of our students and us as teachers as well.