Closing the Distance Between Home and School
three tools that I lean on to make these priorities a reality
A big milestone took place in our family this past week: our first school conference.
No, I’m not talking about the many, many conferences I have held in my own classroom for various students over the years. (Though we had those, too, and once again they went great!)
This time? It was for our little kindergartener.
So there we were, my wife and I on the other side of the table, sitting on those very-low-to-the-ground chairs and looking through all the drawings our kindergartener had done for each letter in their journal and hearing how they usually write their numbers in the right direction and learning how they have a small group of friends already that they play with every recess and taking in so many more other wonderful things as we soaked in every second of this experience.
We left beaming—knowing how fortunate we were to have a teacher that saw our child fully and made it a priority, above all else, to make sure they loved school.
(By the way, they do!)
“I want to close the distance between home and school,” their teacher said early on in the conference, “in terms of you understanding what they’re doing in our classroom.”
Talk about an intention, right?
Hustling back to my own classroom conferences from there, where of course the chairs were a bit taller and the roster of potential conference-goers a bit longer, all things considered the differences were quite small compared to this important reminder I walked into my own room with: the adults supporting a student deserve to know that the classroom is a good place and that their student is seen and valued in that space—along with a confident understanding of what their student is learning and why.
To close that distance positively and purposefully, so to speak.
In today’s post, then, I want to focus on just that: three strategies I find myself leaning upon more and more as a secondary teacher to help build trust and understanding with the families and supporting adults of students.
⓵ Reliable, transparent communication
One of my worries about the increasing reliance on LMS platforms like Canvas or Google Classroom is how, for parents and families, those can become labyrinths that prevent them from understanding what is happening in the classroom and, consequently, what is needed to support their students.
While these platforms have so many elements and tools embedded into them, if you’re not familiar with them—or sometimes, even if you are!—they are a lot to navigate.
For me, then, the easiest way around this problem has been to create a simple slide deck template (pictured above) that gives a rundown of the week’s activities—along with links to more-detailed course information if someone needs it. Not only is this featured on my Canvas homepages, but it is also a very simple thing to provide right away to all adults supporting my students and to continue including in any ongoing communications.
Why I love this as a teacher? It takes all of 5 minutes to duplicate the slide, move it to the top, and update with the new week’s information.
Same link, all school year. Much easier for me!
More importantly, though, after having numerous conversations with adults supporting students in my classroom this past week, I realize what they appreciate is how all the information is accessible at one place, whenever they need it.
“It’s so helpful,” one parent told me this past week, “to be able to know what you’re doing in class if I’m ever curious—just so I can check in with them about it!”
I’ve shared this as a strategy to save time as a teacher before—with links to create your own template included!—but within the context of this post I think the most important thing is that this type of tool expresses two core values:
Transparency — everything we’re doing (the entire semester!) is available at this link, giving those supporting students the ability to check in with what we’re doing at any point. This in turn signals a confidence in my own practices and preparation as a teacher, I believe, and is a key building block of trust.
Reliability — that it is available at one link throughout the course makes it all the more reliable for students as well as families, and it puts front-and-center what is most needed (what we’re doing each week) along with access to more details for those who are curious about them.
⓶ Actionable tools to support students
In the poem “The School Children,” Louise Glück notes the chasm-like distance between the home and the classroom in terms of the disconnect that is often experienced by parents and families in trying to understand what is happening at school:
2 And all morning the mothers have labored
3 to gather the late apples, red and gold,
4 like words of another language.
5 And on the other shore6 are those who wait behind great desks
7 to receive these offerings.
I love teaching this poem for myriad reasons, but one of the main ones is the craft that goes into showing that distance—from the “apples” that are “like words of another language” to the metaphor of school as “the other shore” to the perception of power that teachers hold in this dynamic with their “great desks” to the physical stanza break between home and school. (Seriously: this poem is ridiculously cool and also ridiculously important.)
This is also why I’ve shifted my own communication practices with the adults supporting students in my classroom away from an overload of information—they have 6-7 other teachers, too, and that's not counting if they have multiple kids!—towards less-frequent but more-actionable messages.
With this, the biggest change that is (a) really easy to do and (b) has had a tangible impact for students in my classroom?
Including questions for supporting adults to ask their students related to what is going on in class. (See image above for an example of this!)
Again and again, I’ve heard from parents and families that having these questions is super helpful, but the best feedback I get is actually from students themselves:
“Mr. Luther!” one will say, quite often, coming to class the day after these questions are sent out. “My mom knew EXACTLY what questions to ask me about this class. It was crazy!”
This is when the other students typically point out that they were CC’d on the message home and if this alarmed student had just checked their email, they would have known these questions could be heading their way.
(I’d also add: having to sit down and think about what are the best questions to include in these messages is an important practice for me as a teacher, too. Benefits all around with this strategy, really!)
⓷ Student perspectives of their own learning
Admittedly, I am one of those teachers who loves family conference nights.
There’s nothing better, in my mind, than those stretches of back-to-back-to-back-to-almost-out-of-time conference nights when you are repeatedly talking with families, hearing from students, and collaborating to imagine the path forward. Though my vocal chords typically are teetering by the end of all these enjoyable, important conversations, I soak up every second of them with genuine appreciation.
"You really enjoy teaching, don’t you?” I’ve been asked on these evenings, more times than I can count.
Despite my own enthusiasm, though, I try to begin every single conference with the same, two-fold strategy that instead allows the student perspective to be centered from the get-go:
“How are things going for you overall this year as a student, beyond this classroom, too?”
“Okay, let’s take a look at what you’ve said about your own learning so far.”
From there, I open the learning story document of the student (pictured above) so everyone participating in the conference can read what the student has said about themself as a learner so far. (If the student is there, I typically have them read it aloud.)
I believe this is far more impactful than anything I can share myself about a student, and it almost always becomes a launching point for the conversation in terms of figuring out what the right path forward is going to be.
Stepping back, there is a value here that I think is incredibly important across all my communication with families and supporting adults: above all else, I want to elevate a student’s perspective of their own learning—as only then, I think, can we work as a team in supporting their learning and overall wellbeing.
How a student understands themselves as a learner?
That’s the ball game.
Still, at the end of the day? It’s about the classroom.
Before wrapping up this post, I feel like it is important to add one more disclaimer: in my opinion, none of these strategies matter all that much if you don’t feel good about what is happening in your classroom—and, alternatively, if your classroom is a good place for students, then that is the most powerful way to build credibility and rapport with the parents, families and supporting adults of your students.
Yes, you should come up with your own communication system that is reliable and transparent.
Yes, you should find actionable tools that allow supporting adults to intentionally support their students.
And yes, you should lead by centering the perspectives of students about their own learning.
Regardless, though, all these individual strategies and priorities are downstream of the actual quality of your classroom and the learning taking place within it. So while, yes, you should invest in finding the right path for communicating home, you should also remain clear-eyed about how powerful a good classroom can be in building trust and rapport with students as well as their families and supporting adults.
Top priority? Make your classroom a good place.
Then let people come in and see why.
Potential Discussion for the Comments
Leaning into the value of community we continue to build here with The Broken Copier, I encourage you to jump into the comments this weekend to share your own responses to this post along with the questions below, if you’re willing!
What have you found helpful or challenging as a teacher in communicating with the supporting adults of your students?
Over the past half-decade or so, what has changed for you with this priority? Has it gotten easier or more challenging—and why do you think that is?
How has your own experience potentially as a parent of a student influenced how you approach this work?
Three Closing Recommendations
Once again, I want to continue the pattern of sharing three things that I found meaningful recently as a teacher. (This week? Nothing to do with AI!)
Something to read: “Renourishing Education’s Soil” by — there was a line in this piece that is going to sit with me for some time: “Plants don’t grow because you pull on them - no matter how rigorous your pulling is. They grow when the soil is rich.” The right analogy for this moment in education, I think. Worth a read!
Something to listen to: “Race Science is Back. It Never Went Away” by Jack Schneider and with the podcast, Have You Heard? — This was not a fun listen at all, but I think that is sort of the point: a lot of really dark things have been able to fester while we weren’t paying attention, and the consequences of this momentum could be horrific.
Something to explore: “High school students’ feelings: Discoveries from a large national survey and an experience sampling study” — In this study that Nick Covington shares frequently on BlueSky (you can access a write-up here), it was reported that “that nearly 75% of the students’ self-reported feelings related to school were negative.” And at the end of the day, if we cannot address that—nothing else matters much with this education project, right?
One final note, too: if you’re a kindergarten teacher yourself and constructing phenomenal, affirming foundations for kids in your own classroom, thank you. I cannot think of a more meaningful thing to be doing right now education-wise. Thank you for the work you are doing!
I made a goal for myself similar to your child’s kindergarten teacher. I teach nine and twelve this semester and have daughters in eight and eleven. Communication is really non existent from teachers for my daughters with respect to the classroom. I wanted to change that! I write home at the beginning of each unit, before assessment with strategies that parents can support, and track Friday night good news stories each week with five students (it’s my Friday five practice) It all takes time but it’s really important. I will add a few more strategies from this post too now! I’m very grateful for all you share. 😊
Two things - one, to your whole point of the post, I feel like each year I have strived to do better with communication home and this year it feels like a majority of parents aren’t open to it. Like no one checking in, barely anyone responding to my messages about what we’re doing, etc. Two, my kid also started kindergarten this year and it really is incredible to see them turning more into their own person and kindergarten teachers are magic.