Communicating with Teachers: A Guide for Parents of GCSE and A Level students
A Levels are a big step up from GCSEs, and for many students (and their parents), they can be a real shock to the system. Subjects that once felt manageable suddenly become far more demanding, and it’s not uncommon for even bright, motivated students to struggle. For parents, it can be hard to know how best to help — and all too easy to slip into frustration with both your child and their teachers.
What do I do if I have a bad teacher?
I’m going to rephrase this question to ‘bad relationship’ with the teacher. There are lots of reasons. Sometimes you have a relationship from earlier in school, sometimes you have different values. Some teachers are just dealing with a lot in their own life, and school teaching is SUPER hard.
In this post I want to look at the relationships between students, parents and teachers and what we can do to mend this, because even as a tutor I never want to take sides in some pointless war. No one wins in that situation, least of all students.
I’m going to look at how to manage our expectations on all sides and get away from this horrible online trend of everybody just fighting each other. If you or your child are taking A Levels, they are important – it helps no one if we just try to place blame. Read on to find out how teachers, students and parents can work together to face the challenges of A Levels.
Parents and teachers are on the same side: they both want the student to succeed.
Teachers want your child to succeed, but they also work with large classes and have to balance many needs. A confrontational approach can strain relationships and rarely benefits the student. Here are some tips for parents who want to communicate issues with their child’s A Level teacher:
Remember teachers are individuals
Teachers are human beings, with lives and families and health concerns. They are not superheroes. Their cars break down, their marriages break down. Have realistic expectations for communication – think, do I need to do this over the phone or can I send an email? It’s not actually uncommon for teachers to go 6 hours without having time to respond to email so be a little patient when waiting for a reply.
Ask specific questions
If you are sending an email, try to be clear what you want. If you’re worried about your child’s progress, can you ask for something specific? What do you want to know? You could be asking for a specific resource to support them, or ask if they need to be doing more outside of class. There’s not really anything to be gained from just ranting at a teacher telling them their teaching methods aren’t working or your child doesn’t understand.
Think about how many students they have!
Before you make a request of a teacher, try to consider whether what you are asking is reasonable – compared to the number of students in a class and the number of classes that teacher may have. A typical teacher may have 24 hours of lessons a week and they may see 100-200 different students. Now let’s take an example – your child is uncomfortable asking for help in class, so you want them to stay at the end and spend 10-15 minutes with the teacher to ask questions. It is a pretty innocent request, until you realise that this is an extra hour per week for a single student, and most schools already put on revision sessions and workshops during lunchtimes and after school.
What are ‘reasonable expectations’ of schools and teachers?
I’ve worked in a wide range of schools and they are all very different. I’ve also worked with hundreds of tuition students, which has opened my eyes to some worrying trends and school practises. Within the range of schools and teaching approaches, I do believe there are some common things that are extremely reasonable to expect from a teacher of GCSE or A Level students:
- An overview of the topics being taught, and when: Students should have access to the general plan for a half term – that they know what topics they are being taught, what order and when they might have tests.
- A record of progress: Some sort of record of students progress, strengths and areas for development are kept through the course. These can be shared at appropriate times with parents and should also be shared with students of GCSE or A Level age – we want students to take control of their learning.
- Accommodation of learning needs: The teacher should know of individual learning needs and exam access arrangements. They should be trying to accommodate these as much as is possible (again, remember that some classes may have more than half of students with specific needs, and they still need to get through a packed curriculum!)
- Regular feedback is given: Students should be given the chance to work independently and be provided with feedback on this. This does not have to be written – it can be a conversation or going through work as a class. It is not reasonable to expect every single piece of work (such as notes) to be annotated and this is not the best use of a teacher’s limited feedback time.
Am I being unreasonable in what I ask from a teacher?
A lot can depend on context, but there are definitely a few things that are unnecessary extra requests parents make of teachers. This is not an exhaustive list!
- Physically going to find students: Most teachers have few free periods. It is not the role of a subject teacher to go and find a student to pass on a message or explain something outside of their lesson. Many teachers absolutely do arrange times to see students outside of lessons, but it is up to the student to remember to turn up – with help from parents if necessary.
- Setting separate work for a student not in the lesson: Contentious, maybe. But the days of the pandemic are still raw in my mind and in that of many teachers. If a student is absent for any reason, it is reasonable that the teacher can share digital or paper copies of resources used, homework set – the same resources that were available to students in the lesson. It is not reasonable to ask for all of these materials weeks in advance, or for alternative activities (for example, if a student misses a practical or group activitiy).
- Marking work for someone else’s benefit: Absolutely hated by ALL teachers and zero evidence of any benefit for the student (here is some very good research on marking, and it’s not even particularly new!) – this is what is sometimes referred to as ‘tick and flick’ marking. It is a menial and pointless to mark every page of a students book or folder just so that you know the teacher has seen it. It is not meaningful, particularly for older students – feedback is for them to improve, not to give you evidence of what they’ve done each day.
- Providing reports on progress outside of normal reports or parents’ evenings: If you have a teenager and you want to know how they are getting on in a subject – talk to them first! If they do really badly on a test or misbehave in lessons, chances are schools will let you know. Constant checkins and ‘quick email updates’ are hugely time intensive for teachers.
Here’s a simple rule of thumb – if you expect a teacher to do something, multiply the time it takes by 150. Is it still a reasonable request?
We can’t get along with all teachers, all the time
There are difficult people in all walks of life – students, parents and teachers. Academic success at this level can be a really emotional subject and we all carry a lot of history behavioural patterns that can lead to relationships going wrong.
I like to try to remember the words of Brene Brown whenever I’m getting defensive:
I’m here to get it right, not to be right.
Focus on controllable actions, not on personalities, gut feelings or emotions. Don’t make assumptions about what’s happening – if a teacher is genuinely struggling then it is a problem with the school not supporting them. I genuinely believe that there are very few lazy students and there are also very few lazy teachers.
