A School Leader's Guide to Dealing with Difficult Parents

Todd Whitaker, Douglas J. Fiore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138432642
• eBook ISBN: 9781317332053
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This new supplement to the bestselling Dealing with Difficult Parents, 2nd Edition is designed to help you with the specific challenges you face as a school leader when dealing with parents. The main book, Dealing with Difficult Parents, 2nd Edition, shows how your teachers and other educators can communicate with parents more effectively. With this new supplement, you'll learn how you, as a leader, can--and must--support and coach teachers along the way.

Topics covered include how to…

• Make sure your teachers understand the families they're dealing with;

• Help your teachers communicate effectively with parents by being positive and proactive, so problems don't escalate to the main office;
• Establish expectations for dealing with parents, so teachers understand how to be appropriate even when a parent is not;

• Ensure your teachers feel supported by you when they're dealing with difficult parents; and
• Help teachers become more confident and empowered in challenging situations.

With these practical books, you'll be able to get parents on your side so they can become a positive force in your school's success.

1

Understanding Is Not an Excuse

In Dealing with Difficult Parents (Whitaker, 2002), there is a great deal of information on the factors that affect today’s parents and cause such a seemingly large number of dysfunctional families—and thus students—to arrive at our schools each day. Understanding today’s families can help us be empathetic to the needs of the students we work with each day. It is equally as important for you, as building leaders, to be familiar with the current challenges parents deal with, challenges that our generation—whatever that even means—may not have faced.

However, one key point is that leaders must help their staff members comprehend the difference between understanding the background of the students we have in our classes, cafeteria, and school buses, and using this knowledge as an excuse to not be effective in teaching and reaching our students.

Provide Perspective

Many times, we compare ourselves to others. We wonder why overweight people don’t exercise as much as we do, or we lament that we do not have the metabolism that our trimmer friends do. We assign blame in some situations and make excuses for ourselves in others. This is human nature, to some degree, but we must be careful to make sure it does not prevent us from doing what we can do to make a difference.

So often, we compare ourselves to the side that best proves our point. We will say we are underpaid compared to…and of course, we only do a comparison with those who get paid more than we do. A situation occurred recently where school district employees were threatening a strike because a neighboring district got paid more than they did. I believe that teachers are not nearly paid their worth, but in this situation the irony was the district that was complaining was the second highest compensated in the state. Their neighboring district was the only one that had higher salaries.

A leader has to help provide a proper perspective by making sure that we all are aware of the many positives we have in our school. We can assure you that the parents in your school do the best they know how. This does not mean that they do the best you know how or that they do the best that your college-educated teachers who may have come from supportive, two-parent families know how. It just means that in their current dynamic—and it may be incredibly dysfunctional—they are doing the best they can. They unquestionably love their own children; they just may not know what to do to actually show it at times. Parents who mistreat their children are often times behaving exactly as their parents (if they had them) behaved toward them when they were little. This does not mean they should be doing this—of course not. It does mean that they may not realize what they are doing is inappropriate or even more likely, they do not know what the proper alternatives are.

Part of a teacher and principal’s role is to help teach parents proper skills when the opportunity arises. Dealing with Difficult Parents and this book both have language you can use to help with this teaching process.

Additionally, remember that parents bring the best children they have to your schools and classrooms each day. They do not keep the good ones at home with them; they go ahead and bring all four. Our challenge is to make sure everyone in our school does what is best for each of these students. And many times, we must remember that just like the parents, all of our faculty and staff members do the best they know how. If we have adults who work in our school who are not doing what is right, we must teach them a better way. Then we can hold them accountable for doing so.

Reframing

Perspective is essential. According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, School Nutrition Association (2013), approximately 48 percent of students in the United States are on free and reduced lunch. States vary from a low (New Hampshire) of 24 percent to a high (Washington, D.C.) of 73 percent. Now, knowing where your school falls—and it may be 100 percent—do you and your faculty compare yourselves to schools who have a lower socio-economic population or to one with a higher socio-economic population? As I work with schools and districts around the world, leaders will tell me, “We are very fortunate we have only a 75 percent free- and reduced-lunch population,” because they are comparing themselves to others who are not as well off. By the same token, other leaders will say, “We really have challenging students. Our free- and reduced-lunch rate is up to 19 percent.”

This is not to make light of anyone’s situation at all, quite the opposite. Sometimes we look at those around us who are more fortunate and lament, and other times we may look in the rearview mirror and compare ourselves to what we remember the “good old days” to be like.

There are many factors besides poverty and single-family home makeup that bring challenges for educators. Sometimes we struggle with parents because they are too busy and other times we have parents who continually hover over their children and our schools because they are not busy enough. Too much of a good thing is still too much. The point is that it is up to a leader to continually put things in a light that allows us to continue to move forward and maybe even see how fortunate we are to have the population we do. It is easy to compare ourselves to those who are luckier than we are; however, at times it is essential that we weigh against those who are not, in order to provide the right frame of mind for us to make a difference with the young people in our schools and classrooms.

We cannot control many of the outside influences that our students face, but we can sway the way we view them. It is interesting: The best teachers know more about the background of their students and yet they never use these demographics as an excuse. Less effective staff members barely know the students and yet they seldom hesitate to use these things as a rationale for why they cannot teach a challenging individual. The school leader has to consistently work to make sure that everyone in the building takes a positive view of the school environment as well as of the young people we work with. The students deserve it. It is the least we can do.

Chapter 1 Recap

• Make sure your teachers keep the proper perspective on the families they’re dealing with—but don’t let them use their understanding of these families as an excuse for not dealing with them effectively.
• Reframe situations as needed to help your teachers see the positives in the school and in the students and parents.

2

Identify the Problem Before You Try to Solve It

One of the first challenges we face when we are dealing with difficult people is to make sure we know who is the difficult one. Often times, we must pull up a mirror to find the true source of the problem. As leaders, it is essential we self-reflect, but it is equally critical that we help others in our organization do the same. We focus on internal people first simply because they are the ones we are most responsible for, and they are the ones we have the most ability to influence. Everyone in a school can wish all of the parents were reasonable and had a high level of skills. Everyone in a school can be reasonable and have a high level of skills. That is why this must come first.

If, as leaders, we continually find ourselves having to defend inappropriate practices, our job becomes incredibly and increasingly stressful. And it is deservedly so. Our task as leaders is to make sure we do what is right so we reduce the number of challenges. It is also much easier to defend and support correct practices than it is to rationalize incorrect acts. Everything must start there.

Teach Rather Than Tell

As a school leader, one discovery you may have had is that many teachers are hesitant with or even afraid of parents. There may be multiple reasons for this, and some of them are very good ones. Staff may have had parents be verbally rude when they call them with less than good news. Teachers at different points in their careers have had parents yell or cuss (or worse) at them when they are upset. Whether through email, phone, or in person, many educators wind up being blamed for a student’s academic or interpersonal struggles.

Some of teachers’ hesitation or fear comes from personal experience, and some of it derives from their teaching colleagues telling their own war stories of parent interactions they have had or have heard about. It is imperative that a school leader work to build the skills of all staff members and especially help new teachers begin their careers with an effective skill set involving parent contact.

Dealing with Difficult Parents provides a stem that teachers can use to start all of their contacts with parents. Using something like, “Hi Mrs. Johnson, this is Mary Smith, Kevin’s math teacher. I am sorry to bother you at work…” Giving teachers a consistent way to start each contact—whether it is to deliver good news or bad—is a powerful support mechanism.

Word for Word

One of the primary reasons for writing these books about parents is to provide educators with specific language to use. A building leader could put together a “cheat sheet” of phrases that everyone could have on or near their phone and computer. It is similar to what I did in high school. Before I would nervously call up a girl and ask her on a date, I always had a crib sheet of notes so that after I would vomit, I knew what to say next.

Role Play

It’s like the old saying, “If we don’t model what we teach, then we are teaching something else.” Faculty meetings, new teacher orientations, and other settings could be ideal times to demonstrate how to speak to parents. Then have people role-play and practice specific scenarios that are all too common in your school. Practicing them in a setting like this, so they can hear tone and manner as well as specific terminology, can go a long way to providing support.

Recordings

Many schools now record conversations, just like your cable provider and credit card companies do when you call them. If there are some conversations that are particularly beneficial as learning opportunities (or maybe even humorous depending on the situation), they could be shared with faculty and staff so they have a more precise “how-to” when having interactions like this. The same thing could apply to sharing email responses, etc. when appropriate. You could delete names if needed, but the context might be very beneficial.

Keep It Public

If you want to teach your office staff and other building staff how to defuse volatile parents, and if you want to demonstrate appropriate tone and manner so your staff can manage these upset people themselves (so the upset people don’t wind up in your office!), have the conversation in front of your employees. They will quickly learn how you do not rattle, and they will be more able to emulate the body language, facial...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the Authors
• Introduction: Why This Book?
• 1 Understanding Is Not an Excuse
• 2 Identify the Problem Before You Try to Solve It 5
• 3 Supporting Your Staff
• 4 Be Aware of What You Don’t Know
• 5 Dealing from the Role of the Leader
• 6 The Principal Must Focus on the Future
• 7 Always Show Concern
• 8 The Fairness Doctrine
• 9 What If We Are Wrong?
• 10 Build Relationships Before You Need Relationships
• Parting Thoughts
• References