Parent Teacher Partnership Quotes

Unfortunately, parents who put a priority on saving kids from frustration and teachers who put a priority on challenging their students often butt heads, and consequently, the parent-teacher partnership has reached a breaking point. Teaching has become a push and pull between opposing forces in which parents want teachers to educate their children with increasing rigor, but reject those rigorous lessons as “too hard” or “too frustrating” for their children to endure. Parents rightly feel protective of their children’s self-esteem, but teachers too often bear the brunt of parental ire.

Nurture parent-teacher relationships. When students feel that parents are talking negatively about their teacher, it undermines that critical relationship, akin to the acrimonious divorce of parents, notes Suniya Luthar. Students learn best from teachers they feel close to, and teachers play an essential role in buffering against achievement stress. Show respect and appreciation when you speak about or interact with their teachers. Actively build a partnership with educators so that a child can be best supported. “Replace” yourself. Consider creating your own council of parents. Value and appreciate the adults in your children’s lives. Guard that time so that they can enjoy a wider safety net of support. You might even make it formal, as some parents I interviewed did, by creating a master sheet of phone numbers and meeting together as a group. Encourage gratitude. Help children to get into the habit of telling others explicitly why they matter. You might adopt a regular gratitude practice at home, like “the one thing I love about the birthday person.” Teach kids how to think gratefully. Point out when someone goes out of their way to find a present for them, or when they do something kind that makes your child’s life better. Researchers find gratitude is the glue that binds relationships together.

When discipleship is narrowed down to jumping through behavioral hoops and ticking the right theological boxes, grace is squeezed out, and we come to see God as just plain impossible to please, like some nasty first-grade teacher or harsh, authoritarian parent. When we reduce Christianity to a negative system where fasting becomes more sacred than feasting, law wins out over grace, and correct theology becomes more important than divine encounter, we in effect become the modern-day Pharisees—whose ministry Jesus was set against.

LEACH: But you share a partnership? TANYA BERRY: Of course. He’s doing the writing. And it’s important work, so I’m supportive. He supports my work, too. BERRY: We’re a “he” and a “she,” or you could say, we’re two “I’s.” But at this point in my life I know I don’t make any sense as an individual, partly because I don’t make sense without her, any more than I would make sense without this place, or without the parents I had, or the friends and teachers I’ve had.