Effective Parent-Teacher Meetings

Hours: 24 / Access Length: 180 Days / Delivery: Online, Self-Paced

Course Overview:

In this course, teachers will learn and review constructive communication skills that will enhance the parent/teacher meeting and assist in building positive relationships. Effective communication skills will be included both verbal and nonverbal communication along with proper preparation. In addition, participants will also learn techniques to handle difficult conversations, learn methods for defusing a escalated conversation and redirecting the tone of the meeting. Learners will have the opportunity to watch videos of both productive and non-productive teacher/parent meetings and reflect on the how the skills previously learned. Additional, participants may identify additional tips and tricks that may be useful in their own classroom, such as setting an action plan for the teacher, student and parent to work on together. Lastly, participants will review follow-up activities that can be used after the parent/teacher meeting.

Students will:

• Identify skills and behaviors that will enhance the parent/teacher meeting dynamic.
• Recognize techniques that can be used pre-meeting, during and post-meeting to reinforce a positive experience for both the parent and teacher.
• Evaluate methods to maintain a positive tone in the meeting as well as address difficult conversations.
• Identify follow up actions that can encourage ongoing communication.

Course Outline:

Lesson 1: Constructive Communication

Within parent-teacher meetings, as in life, positive communication skills can play a large role in building and maintaining good relationships.  In this lesson, many of these skills will be discussed within the text and in the accompanying resources.  

Lesson 2: Elements of a Positive Parent-Teacher Meeting

Now lets look at the different components of the parent-teacher meeting.  What can teachers do throughout the year to make the parent-teacher meeting more productive?  How should a teacher prepare and what should be covered?  These questions and more will be answered in this lesson. 

Lesson 3: Addressing Difficult Topics

While the parent-teacher meeting is a place to discuss all of the positives of a student's academic life, it may also be the time for teachers to discuss with parents areas for improvement or negative behaviors.  This lesson includes strategies teachers can use to address these topics while managing the conversation in a productive way. 

Lesson 4: After the Meeting: Follow Up

In lesson 4, proper follow up procedures will be presented that will assist in maintaining a positive and engaging relationship with the parent. Additionally, the appendices will be reviewed in again in total to provide an all encompassing view of how these resources can be used as follow up documents.

All necessary course materials are included.

System Requirements:

Internet Connectivity Requirements:

• Cable, Fiber, DSL, or LEO Satellite (i.e. Starlink) internet with speeds of at least 10mb/sec download and 5mb/sec upload are recommended for the best experience.

NOTE: While cellular hotspots may allow access to our courses, users may experience connectivity issues by trying to access our learning management system.  This is due to the potential high download and upload latency of cellular connections.   Therefore, it is not recommended that students use a cellular hotspot as their primary way of accessing their courses.

Hardware Requirements:

• CPU: 1 GHz or higher
• RAM: 4 GB or higher
• Resolution: 1280 x 720 or higher.  1920x1080 resolution is recommended for the best experience.
• Speakers / Headphones
• Microphone for Webinar or Live Online sessions.

Operating System Requirements:

• Windows 7 or higher.
• Mac OSX 10 or higher.
• Latest Chrome OS
• Latest Linux Distributions
  

NOTE: While we understand that our courses can be viewed on Android and iPhone devices, we do not recommend the use of these devices for our courses. The size of these devices do not provide a good learning environment for students taking online or live online based courses.

Web Browser Requirements:

• Latest Google Chrome is recommended for the best experience.
• Latest Mozilla FireFox
• Latest Microsoft Edge
• Latest Apple Safari

Basic Software Requirements (These are recommendations of software to use):

• Office suite software (Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, or LibreOffice)
• PDF reader program (Adobe Reader, FoxIt)
• Courses may require other software that is described in the above course outline.