Empower Students’ Families with Modern Classrooms
If you’re launching a Modern Classroom for the first time, you may encounter some skepticism from parents and guardians. This is natural - and good! This isn’t always easy to do — but consider yourself to have allies at home who care so deeply about their students’ education.
Fortunately, our blended, self-paced, mastery-based model can empower parents and guardians to better support student learning at home. Here’s how you can make this happen:
1) Share your videos. Imagine that one of your students is struggling with a problem at home, and their parent or guardian doesn’t immediately know how to help. What can that student do? Watch your video, of course! Not only will this help the adult understand the material — and thus help the adult help their child — but it will also help the adult get to know you, and learn how much you care about teaching their child. (If you didn’t care, you wouldn’t have gone to all the trouble to create that video.) It’s like having your kid’s teacher at home, too.
2) Share your progress trackers. Whether you use public or individual trackers (both work!), make sure that families know how their students’ progress is monitored and displayed. This will give every parent and guardian a detailed understanding of what their students have and have not (yet) learned. This is much more descriptive than the standard letter or percentage grade: it tells every parent or guardian exactly what their child needs to do next, and keeps everyone — student included — on exactly the same page.
3) Share your reasoning. Why have you chosen to implement a Modern Classroom, anyways? It’s probably because you want to meet each student’s individual needs, and to help your students develop the perseverance and self-efficacy they’ll need to succeed long after your course is over. What parent or guardian doesn’t want a responsive, future-ready education for their child? Ask your parents to reinforce at home the messages you’re sending at school, and chances are that your students (if they haven’t already) will buy into your new approach as well.
4) Share the evidence. Our model is backed by academic research on the science of learning, as well as years of program evaluation. This research shows that, among other benefits, students in Modern Classrooms feel more comfortable using technology, more engaged in their learning, and closer with their teachers. Give families the link to our Impacts page, or to the academic research we’ve conducted. Let them know that you’re doing this because you know it works.
5) Share our resources. Are your students’ families eager to learn more? Send them to our free online course, our dedicated FAQ for families, or our contact page. We stand by what we do are glad to discuss our work with anyone who will listen.
As educators ourselves, we know that it takes a village to educate a child, and that a classroom works best when everyone involved — students, teachers, administrators, and families — is on board. Use the strategies above to align all these parties to your shared goals, and you’ll pave the way for productive learning and growth.
P.S. Are parents concerned that this model won’t work for advanced learners? We hear this concern a lot — but it isn’t the case! In fact, Modern Classrooms are ideal for advanced learners, because there’s no limit to how far any learner can go! Read our blog post on advanced learners, and feel free to share this with families as well.