Every Teacher's Guide to Working With Parents
- Gwen L. Rudney - University of Minnesota-Morris, Coordinator of Elementary Education
Administration & Leadership
Transform teacher-parent relationships into a strategy for children's success!
While most parents strive to support their children with the best parenting practices, both teachers and parents often find themselves struggling to reconcile conflicts that can result in hostility, defensiveness, and communication breakdowns. In addition, negative public constructions of parents perpetuate this dilemma, particularly for those parents who are already marginalized through poverty or language barriers.
Working from research in three key areas-parent development and skills, social and historical family influences, and parent-school relationships-educator (and parent) Gwen L. Rudney offers teachers:
- Useful interpretations of parent beliefs and actions
- Compelling insight into what parents expect from teachers
- Key ideas that characterize the struggles that parents face while raising children
- Practical strategies designed to lead to community, trust-building, collaboration, gratitude, and friendship with parents
Straightforward chapters offer teachers everything from theory to commonsense strategies for working with parents to improve life and learning for all children.
“Gives educators strategies to help involve, influence, and become partners with parents. This book will be an asset to all teachers, especially beginning teachers in training, new teachers, and teachers who mentor other teachers. All teachers can be reminded of the important role we play in a family’s life.”
“Teachers can easily use the strategies to be more effective communicators. Most importantly, the entire book is discussing a problem that all teachers have. .. We all have unique circumstances, but we all want the best for the students. How we do this is creating an effective plan that works for each individual child. This book’s strategies make it seem possible.”
“As I was reading it, I found things I could use in my next parent conference…The tone and style of the book really appealed to me. It was a fast read because it was so practical and useful. I wanted to keep reading to see what good information would come next."
“A practical and valuable tool to teachers and parents."
“I will be recommending this book to my principal for staff in-service training…. I think all teachers should read this as a great refresher on working with parents. I highlighted pieces of information on almost every page."
“Parent user–friendly...not overloaded with professional jargon.”
