Communication - My Favorite Paradox

Teachers spend much of their time these days talking about innovation.  We attend workshops and conference that are specifically geared toward teaching kids to innovate.  We spend a lot of time talking about the jobs our students will face.  More specifically, we talk about how we don't know what kind of jobs our students will face, so we need to teach them to innovate in an ever-changing world.  We construct projects now that are less about content than they are about the process of engineering or research. 


We talk about these things so much that we forget most of the rest of the world is not having this conversation.  They don't sit down every Monday at work and discuss how their kids should engage in innovation-based learning.  We forget that when they see the new and amazing project assignment Johnny comes home with, they don't know what objectives we have in mind.  We forget that they weren't sitting at our desks with us when we created it.  They see something that doesn't look like anything they did when they were in school, and that is frightening because they don't know how to help with it.  Because this is 2017, they pick up their phone or laptop and send an e-mail to the teacher to question the project.

As teachers, we complain a lot about this type of parent communication.  It feels like a lack of trust, so we take it personally.  We feel like our professional judgment is being questioned,  but it is really only because we have forgotten to communicate our thinking to them.  We could eliminate MOST (not all) parent e-mails of this type if we remembered this simple paradox:

"The more e-mails I send, the fewer e-mails I get."


It sounds crazy, I know, but I promise that it works.  I've been doing this my entire career because I began teaching just as e-mail was becoming a tool for this type of communication.  I don't send home communication about every worksheet or lab we do, but I absolutely send emails about assignments that aren't like the ones we saw in school (or even like the ones we did just ten years ago).  When our juniors started using Twitter to have book chats about the literature they were reading, the teacher sent home a detailed description of how Twitter was chosen for this activity.  When our history teacher, English teacher, and I collaborated on Story Corp last year,  I sent an e-mail to our 8th-grade parents, explaining what Story Corp was and why were assigning it as a group and what each of us planned to do as a follow-up.  I got exactly three e-mails in response to this.  Two were questions about who their student could interview; one was concern that the person they were interviewing wouldn't want to be on the internet.  If I had not sent that e-mail and the student had come home, saying, "Mom, I have to interview Grandpa over Thanksgiving for English, History, and Science," I think all three of us would have gotten a lot of questions.

This goes beyond projects.  It is common for my 8th-grade students to tank their second test with me.  It is when the questions start requiring more analysis and less memorization.  Students who are accustomed to getting As in science often earn a C+ on that one.  Students who have typically gotten Cs without a lot of studying will find their grade below failing.  As you can imagine, this creates a stir at home that would flood my inbox if I weren't proactive about it.  After I have graded this test but before I enter the grades in RenWeb, I send an e-mail to all the parents of that grade.  I tell them that this is normal and why it happens.  I tell them not to panic yet because it takes time to adjust to this new skill.  I tell them that I do not give extra credit because that covers up the problem without solving it.  I have saved the text of this e-mail in a document so that all I have to do is copy, paste, and edit it.  The responses I get to this e-mail are usually thankful for the heads-up.  It is amazing how the number of e-mails changes as well as their tone. 

I know it seems like a paradox that putting some time into your e-mails will save you time on your e-mails, but if you try it, it will quickly become your favorite paradox.