Reduce anxiety and support student growth by tapping into resources outside of school
Our focus group and survey research with families indicates that most parents and families want to understand 3 things: what their child is learning, how their child is performing, and what they can do to support. Families look to teachers as a trusted academic resource in their child’s learning journey. Assessments offer a unique opportunity to engage with families to share information about their child’s academic performance.
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Demystify the assessment experience for students and families.
Parents are uniquely positioned to help their child prepare for the assessment experience. They can be another resource that you can rely on to offer more personalized support. |
Fill an important information gap for families.
Parents and families need insight into their child’s academic performance, when things are going well and when their child might be struggling. You play an important role in helping families make sense of their child’s assessment data. |
Gain access to an extended student success team.
You have an opportunity to extend your student success team to include parents/families. You gain an expert on each students’ needs and another person to support. |
Top tips and tools for communicating with families during assessment season.
Every family communication is a potential point of connection and opportunity for collaboration. We’ve compiled a few best practices for communicating with families with families around assessments. Scroll to the next section for templates!
Consider how to make your communication accessible to all families.Before adding more to your communication routine, we’d suggest starting with a reflection activity that can help you identify your strengths and areas that you’d like to explore.
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Explore an example of high-impact family communication (focused on learning!)Demystifying classroom instruction and assessments is essential to equip families and caregivers to engage. We've found that the most impactful messages take into consideration the content (topic and avoiding jargon), cadence or frequency of communication, and length of message (brief). We have a team of professional writers that develop curriculum-aligned messages for families. Explore a sample message where they model best practices and break down the anatomy of what makes it a high-impact message.
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Message templates to include in your assessment communication plan.We also understand how time consuming it is to communicate about a student’s glows and grows, and share consistent updates with families. We’ve created message templates that you can use to communicate with families. Our message templates cover the following topics:
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Explore more Teacher Resources
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