Dealing with students is all right. What about dealing with their parents?

Brasilia, October 3, 2014. Colégio Mackenzie. BrazTesol One-Day Seminar "Be all you can be".

For years now I have been reflecting on careers and career management. I have been applying business management concepts to managing the teaching career and sometimes even managing the classroom and its surroundings.

•   2010, Generation Y - together with other branch managers at Cultura Inglesa, we studied generation Y clients (yes, clientes);

•   2012, How many careers do teachers have? - a presentation in which I applied strategic planning principles to career management;

•   2013, Telling career stories - a presentation again about careers, but this time it was on the different possible careers on EFL based on the stories of real professionals.

This time, I am going back to the school environment to apply negotiation principles to the (sometimes) difficult task of relating to students' parents.

This One-Day Seminar theme is just perfect: Be all you can be. As I see it, to be all they can be, teachers should be prepared to go beyond methodologies, techniques, classroom activities. To be all they can be, teachers should understand how to become more complete professionals in areas such as career management, entrepreneurship, business management.

In the path to becoming a T-shaped professional – one that is able to see their job, their career, the institution they work for from a broader perspective – teachers should understand how important it is to deal not only with students, but also their parents.

Click here to view the presentation, but presentations alone are not very useful. This is why I wrote this post to expand and detail the ideas exposed in the presentation.

As a child and a teenager, I was a cub scout and a boy scout. I left the Movement and years later, as an adult, I became a leader scout. I deeply admire the Movement, its principles and its educational method.

Do you know what the Scout motto is?

Being prepared is, in my opinion, the most important aspect in a teacher-parent relationship. The preparation I refer to here is the technical and emotional. A teacher must know what they are doing and must be able to explain and demonstrate it to parents. Also, teachers must be emotionally stable enough to deal with parents' not always reasonable demands and reactions.

Probably Keep calm and be prepared should be the last slide of the presentation. Even thought it is now a cliché, it summarizes the two basic conditions for teachers to be effective and efficient when meeting parents and relating to them: keeping calm refers to the emotional preparation and professionalism teachers must have to make the best of talks and conferences with parents.

Since the presentation is already backwards, let me show the steps to a successful teacher parent conference:

•   Establish a positive atmosphere: greet the parent, smile, give a firm handshake, thank him/her for being there;

•   Report student’s successes, always based on facts; give details, be as specific as possible; use objective language;

•   Talk about challenges the student faces, again based on facts; the same principles apply here;

•   Focus on the next steps: be specific, objective and establish intermediary aims.

IMPORTANT TIPS: smile; mind your tone of voice; give a firm handshake; sit on the same side of the table or next to the parent if you are sitting on classroom desks; try to establish a give and take pattern to the conference in which the parent also contributes to the success of the meeting by providing relevant facts on the student; thank the parent for being there.


Another crucial element to being able to manage parents is knowing the institution's policy towards teacher-parent contact. If this policy is not made clear upon hiring or during the inicial training sessions, make sure you talk to the school coordinator, supervisor, administration, manager, mentor, coach, to whomever may help you understand how the school sees it.


Thoroughly understand the school's rules and communication system with parents. When talking to a superior or mentor, clarify how far you can go when in contact with parents. Also, make sure you keep a channel open to ask for help when necessary.


Again, be prepared and share. When dealing with a more delicate situation or when you foresee a more problematic student or parent, share it with the person in charge, be it your supervisor, coordinator or manager.


In extremely difficult situations or with extremely problematic parents, you may have a colleague be with you in the conference with the parent. This way, you will split the parent's focus and new arguments may raise or at least there is someone else with you to go through a tougher situation.


My experience has shown that when the teacher takes the initiative of the conversation, he/she will keep being in control of the conference. It is important to show the parent that you are in charge, that you know what you are doing.


Smile, give a firm handshake, thank the parent(s), invite them to sit down and start the conversation: good evening, thank you for coming. Please take a sit here. Tell me, what does Xxxx report about the classes?


Being in control gives you the chance to change the course of the conversation or end the meeting when you needed.


Another key aspect to the teacher-parent relationship: always base your interactions with parents on FACTS. I cannot stress it enough. FACTS, FACTS, FACTS. Specific and objective language to describe FACTS.


Vagueness in the language only leads to misunderstandings or inactions or dissatisfactions or frustrations. Maybe all of them. Perhaps any combination you may think of.

The two most vague, pointless and even offensive statements in my opinion are: “Ele não está entendendo/aprendendo nada”, from parents: “Ele não está interessado”, from teachers.

There is no meaning in these statements. Saying that a student understands or learns nothing makes the teacher feels totally frustrated. It means that NOTHING the teacher does is relevant or achieves the student.

Also, telling parents that their kid is not interested in studying is also devastating. Me, as a father, try my best to show my daughters how important studying and acquiring knowledge is important. If I head from a teacher that they are not interested in the classes or studying, I would feel I had failed as a father.

In the parent-teacher relationship, it is essential that conclusions are drawn from FACTS and, preferably, TOGETHER with the parents.

I propose that teachers do the exercise xxxx instead of yyyyyyy.




There are two aspects in the following crazy exchange:

Parent: She understand nothing in your class.

Teacher: Yeah, she is not interested in learning or studying English.

So, let’s start the exercise from the teacher’s statement.

Instead of She is not interested, try talking about the student’s performance, punctuality, completion of tasks, participation:

“She tends to use a lot of Portuguese in class and she is frequently disruptive because the talks to her classmates a lot; or she tends to be extremely quiet and easily loses her concentration. Based on this behavior, it seems to me she…”

Now, the other statement.

Instead of She is learning nothing, try eliciting facts for you to understand what the parent means by the sentence:

Is she able to do her homework? What does she report about the classes? Is she able to understand the commands in class? Has she reported any problems with classmates or staff?

Then, based on the answers, you may draw your conclusion.

Two important observations here: part of keeping calm (and being emotionally prepared) is not taking the sentence personally; also, be prepared to realize you are not reaching this specific student effectively and think about a solution.

Here goes more typical sentences that may fit in this exercise.

Instead of: ele/ela está bem; ele/ela pode melhorar; ele/ela precisa se dedicar mais; ele participa bem; ele/ela não está interessado; ele precisa gostar de estudar;

Try: ?????


Besides vagueness, another mortal approach to the students' progress is judge their actions and base your conversation with the parent on your impressions.


Also, finding out about the student is essential. There may be many aspects of the student's life, personality, behavior and routine that should be taken into consideration. Have a set of questions that may help you discover these aspects and help you and the parents find the best solution to any challenge the student may be facing.

Now, moving to our next component of the parent-teacher relationship: negotiating.

The most basic concepts of negotiating are:

• ·      Negotiating is important, whether you enjoy it or not;
• ·      Negotiating is building a relationship;
• ·      Negotiation is an agreement, a pact, a combination among parties.

Negotiating is NOT using its tools to get advantages over other people, but getting the best result possible for BOTH or ALL parties.

Effective negotiators:

• ·      Take calculated risks;
• ·      Get results with limited resources;
• ·      Are attentive listeners;
• ·      Are patient and persistent;
• ·      Focus on facts;
• ·      Are flexible;
• ·      FOCUS ON THE SOLUTION, rather than focus on looking for someone to blame.

Effective negotiators are constantly looking for win-win outcomes in their negotiations.

Now, I would like to propose another exercises. Think about moments or situations in the teacher-parent relationship or in a teacher-parent conference in which these concepts are applicable.

For instance, once a teacher came to me to report a talk he had with the mother of one of his students. The teacher proposed solutions that were not totally in accordance to the rules of the school (more extra lessons and a new date for the test), but in the context, that was the best solution he could find.

The mother was happy, the student was relieved and the problem was solved.

The teacher took risks, he was flexible and he focused on the solution of the problem. He could only do this because he was completely aware of the institution’s policy and resources. Probably the teacher had to listen to the mother and student attentively and be persistent to get in touch with the parent and get her to come to the school.

Now, the final element: being prepared.

Obviously, teachers have to be technically prepared and know what they are doing in class; they have to be effective teachers and efficient employees.

I would like to add to this preparation the accumulation of data and facts about the students. All schools have their evaluation system and probably several different forms to keep record of students’ marks, homework assignments, compositions and so on.

I believe that the thorough record keeping of these pieces of information plus data related to the student’s day-to-day performance makes a huge difference when talking to parents.

In the presentation, I show spreadsheets I use with my groups in which I keep record of their marks as well as their performance in aspects such as participation in class, use of English in class and discipline.

This collection of data is used to give feedback to the students and to base my talks with parents. The record keeping itself becomes and irrefutable argument.

We educators should keep in mind that our primary focus is the students and their learning and education.

I also believe we have to BE ALL WE CAN BE to help our students be all THEY can be.

All the best,

Marcelo Elias