Artifact: Parent Letter

Standard 4 is for educators to recognize parents, guardians, families, and communities as valuable educators in every student’s life.  This standard directs teachers as educators to work together in partnership with these factors extraneous to the school confines in order to better understand student backgrounds and characters.  In turn, students are benefited with a stronger continuity between their school environment and the community within which they reside.

The letter shown above was given to me by a parent regarding the testing and assessment of her son.  Specifically, the content of the letter referred to the special method of testing that she felt her son required in my mathematics 5 class.  The response that I showed demonstrated standard 4, which is that “educators value the involvement and support of parents, guardians, families, and communities in schools”.  Rather than interpret her request as a challenge on my teaching and assessment habits, I instead saw it as support she was providing me.  In turn, I devised a new way to assess her son which took into account his visual needs.  The adaptation contrasted from the typical testing that I gave the rest of the class by asking the student to physically show me on the blackboard how to perform the different transformations such as flip, turn, and slide by the use of construction paper manipulatives.  This differed from the test I gave to the rest of the class due to the normal test being of a more traditional written nature.  However, the questions given to both groups of students were identical; merely the delivery was different.  I observed that the student was much more at ease with answering the questions posed to him with this alternate form of assessment.  Reflecting upon this, his performance on the adapted test is very likely a better representation of his understanding of the subject matter than if he was given a traditional written test.  I feel grateful that his parent offered such valuable insight into the student’s cognitive ability which ultimately led to a more positive and accurate experience for both student and teacher.

Upon first receiving the letter from the student’s parent, I immediately felt defensive in that his parent was criticizing my instructional methods.  No matter how fleetingly this moment lasted, it was my instinctive reaction.  It was a letter reminding me of the impending error that I was about to make in assessing a special learner such as this case.  However, as I processed and reflected on the letter, I reached a more logical reaction.  Recalling the theorist Bronfenbrenner’s idea of multiple layers of interconnected social worlds affecting every individual, I realized this fragment of information in the letter was highly valuable because it is one of the few pieces of information that I have from the social world of the student’s family.  As I began to accept and appreciate the help that was being offered to me from a parent, I also began unconsciously adapting my test to suit the student’s needs as described in the letter.  It is only after going through with the adapted test and meeting with his mother that I came to the realization that I had inadvertently worked as a team with this parent simply by receiving the communication from her and responding appropriately to it.

In the future I aim to welcome these collaborative opportunities with parents as valuable learning experiences for me in understanding their children.  Furthermore, my response will be to initiate some form of follow-up with the parent whenever possible so as to setup a stronger understanding between the parent and myself.  I believe that this will only benefit the student, as this case has verified to me.