4 Tips for Communicating with Your Child’s Teacher

We know that the start of a new school year can be nerve-wracking for both you and your child. Parts one and two of our back-to-school toolkit offer plenty of resources to help you prepare for the year ahead, from navigating a new campus to preparing an IEP summary for new teachers and making sure your child has the right adaptive supplies or assistive technology for their needs. Despite all the prep work you’ve done at the onset of the school year, there are bound to be some bumps in the road — so we asked Education Advocate Lisa Carey for her best tips on how to start the school year right.

A huge part of setting up your child for success throughout the upcoming months is communicating with their teacher(s). Check out Lisa’s tips below for smoother sailing when it comes to following up with the teacher.

To make it easier for your child teacher(s) to keep up with their IEP accommodations, it may be helpful to give them a single-page document that they can keep on hand for reference. If you're an Undivided member, check out our printable IEP accommodations template here to make one for your child.

Many parents ask for teachers to write a brief, daily account of their child’s progress at school. This might cover academics, behavior, health, services, or whatever is most important to update the family on.

Many families create their own daily parent-teacher communication log with questions that might be relevant to their unique situation, but our advice is to have something the teacher and aide can fill out in two minutes — checkboxes are great! “I like when the aide fills out the log,” Lisa says, “and the teacher can approve it. My son’s team uses a form each day that tells what he did, bathroom information, eating information, and has some checkboxes and fill-in blanks. For example, my son sometimes refuses to go to the bathroom to be changed, so there is a box that says ‘Used restroom: yes or no’ and how many prompts.”

When you ask your child’s teacher to collaborate with you on a teacher-parent communication log, ask what format would work best for them. In this clip, Lisa offers plenty of examples for paper or digital logs that families can use:

If you're an Undivided member, check out our printable communication log template or our daily report template.

According to Lisa, you may want to “memorialize” in the IEP what kind of communication you are looking for and clarify what you want to learn from the communication with the teacher. For example, you could decide on a weekly report on struggles, what subjects were taught, what's going to be taught, social, etc., or request to meet once a month in person, over the phone, or on Zoom. Lisa suggests to follow up anything verbal with an email summarizing what you and the teacher discussed so that this communication is logged.

Lisa’s advice is to prioritize what you’d like your child’s teacher to communicate to you. “You, as a parent, need to decide what it is you want to know, and what it is you need to know, and how frequently you actually need that. You could be open to not getting all of the details about every single thing every single day, because that is a lot.” Maybe that looks like asking about just one or two of your most important concerns each day and then asking for more detail just once a week.

Thank you to the parents who submitted questions for Lisa during our live event! If you missed the event or want to review what we learned, you can catch the full recording and transcript here.

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