Dr. Kayla Ward from Oakwood University has extensive experience teaching various age groups. Ward presented at the QM conference about “Teach Talk: Reaching out to Parents Before Parents Reach Out to You” and began the session by showing a funny video about parents teaching during the pandemic. They then had an activity to share parent and teacher complaints. Some challenges listed by Ward were parental insecurity, pessimistic presumptions, and time constraints. Ward shared another video that was a comical series of types of parents when coming to visit the teacher. The audience was then invited to share their approaches to communicating with students. Participants shared strategies for communicating with teachers too. Some spoke about using Remind. Ward did mention that getting parents to sign up can be a challenge. Some proposed strategies were team trap (a scheduled check-in, for example), neighbors to share information, and the Remind app…While this session was focused on K-12 teachers and teachers-in-training, several of these strategies could be helpful in a higher education context.
