Communicating with parents, colleagues, and administrators

Effective communication is often about avoiding problems rather than solving them. These resources on communicating with parents, participating in a mentoring relationship, and working with colleagues and administrators will help you communicate effectively in a number of situations.

Learn more

Related pages

• Building a support network: Every teacher needs support networks, both formal and informal. This guide to LEARN NC's collections will point you to resources that show you how to build your own and get the help you need.
• Communication: The key to successful mentoring: Building support systems begins with asking for help — and giving it.
• Conversations, questions, and answers for a beginning teacher: A kindergarten teacher begins her career with an excellent support network.

Related topics

• Learn more about administrators, communication, mentoring, and new teacher support.

Legal

It isn’t easy to go into a school with an established culture, policies, and hierarchy and immediately find a way to fit in — especially when it’s your first job and you’re fresh out of college. And it isn’t always easy to communicate effectively with parents, either, especially when they may vary from extremely interested in their child’s education to seemingly uninterested. But as with so many things, effective communication is often about avoiding problems rather than solving them.

Communicating with parents

The key to communicating effectively with parents is to communicate continually — not just when there’s a problem. Start from the first day of school and keep them informed throughout the year.

This series of articles will help you find and take advantage of regular opportunities to communicate with parents. Start with our introduction, which will guide you through the basics of parent communication: being caring, professional, open, and organized. Then read about opportunities to communicate with parents. If you’re just a little bit technologically savvy, you might try using a web page to communicate with parents: read about how a first-grade teacher does it.

• Find articles and related resources on parent communication

Working with mentors

Even if you have a great mentor, this series of articles can help you get the most out of the relationship. Written by beginning teachers, mentors, and mentor coordinators, the articles will help you see the mentoring process from all sides.

• Find articles and related resources on mentoring and working with mentors

Working with colleagues, assistants, and administrators

How can you make the most of your opportunities to work with your fellow teachers, administrators, and assistants?

• Find resources on working with colleagues and administrators