It’s a call that many parents get at some point. Neither welcome nor unique. “Hey, I just wanted you to know your child is struggling with… [insert academic skill here]. Can we meet to discuss our options?”
Parents know their children better than any teacher could. Under the right conditions, they can collaborate at a high level with teachers to ensure that diverse learning needs are being catered to. Partnerships thrive in an environment of respect, patience, and communication.
In this article, we take a look at how parents and teachers can work together to support the needs of diverse learners.
Defining Diverse Learning
School systems cater primarily to paper-and-pencil learners. Information is read and processed, while comprehension is evaluated through written tests, papers, and exams.
While this approach is common, it does not necessarily reflect the way that most people learn.
Diverse learners can be people with disabilities or barriers to learning. They can also just be students whose needs aren’t quite reflected by typical educational frameworks.
Students who struggle in their learning environments are not necessarily less gifted than their classmates, nor are they more predisposed to a life of difficulties.
In most cases, they simply haven’t quite been given the tools they need to find success yet.
Communication Between Parents and Educators
Parents today are most likely used to a very hands-off approach to communication with teachers. This, at least, is the system that they were most likely raised in. Aside from the occasional remark at pick-up or the once-annual parent-teacher conference, communications were historically limited primarily to report cards.
Today, there are much more robust collaboration tools shared between parents and instructors. Many schools use virtual communication systems, like Classroom Dojo, that make it easy for teachers and parents to exchange fast messages at will.
Every school will be a little different in how it handles parent-instructor communications, and individual classroom policies may also vary.
It is important to respectfully comply with the expectations of your child’s school, but if you are concerned with the way they are being taught or their barriers to learning, establishing outreach is absolutely an important and appropriate first step.
Reach out with your concerns to the teacher through the communication channel that they most likely specified at the beginning-of-the-year communications.
In most cases, they will be receptive, collaborative partners. We should understand, of course, that there are limits to how much you can influence classroom management, but in most cases, the educator will be a very willing collaborator.
What Can Be Done to Meet the Needs of Diverse Learners?
That will ultimately depend on what qualities make the students’ needs a little different than those of the general student body.
Special education classrooms are there to address specific disability-related barriers to learning. This can include everything from intellectual disabilities to behavioral problems or conditions like ADHD and dyslexia.
For students whose needs simply aren’t being met by the model of instruction that is being primarily employed in the classroom, there may be adaptive learning programs or more individualized instructional opportunities available.
Many of the online tools that classrooms use for individualized work do have customization options that will allow for learning modules that are more tailored to the student’s ideal comprehension style.
Paraprofessionals and other support staff are also there to work more individually with students who need additional help.
These resources are often readily available in most public school classrooms. If, for some reason, your school is unable to provide the resources you feel your child requires, you can continue to follow up, even escalating the issue to the attention of administrators where appropriate.
Rarely will there be a situation where the school does not want to help, but it may require a degree of compromise and communication to develop a solution that works for all parties.
Structurally Optimizing Schools For All Types of Learning
All of the tips we’ve described up until this point are useful in individual situations. However, they are not sustainable answers to the problem of personalizing education. A system that depends on 20 parents contacting a single teacher with tips, recommendations, suggestions, preferences, and so on simply doesn’t work at scale.
Who is responsible for ensuring that students have their unique learning needs taken into account? The answer to that question actually is not necessarily their teacher. Teachers have so much more on their plates than the average parent could understand.
They genuinely cannot completely personalize their classroom for every single student, but there are professionals who can help develop systems within a school district that are better optimized for personalization.
Most of them are administrators with Ed.D. degrees, and Ed.D. is a degree for professionals looking to assume leadership roles within a school district.
These professionals may help design curricula or craft policies and designs to better reflect the way that all students learn. It’s important to always keep in mind that educators are well-intentioned people making the most of limited resources.
That’s not necessarily moving or persuasive information when you feel like your student, your child, is being let down by the education system, but it is helpful to remember as you communicate with the professionals at your child’s school.
Education improves slowly but surely. The system is not and never will be perfect, but with effort, communication, and collaboration, you can make things better for your student and maybe the school as a whole.
