Building Student Academic Success: One Student and Family at a Time

“Put all the guys with the referrals in one class; I’ll take care of them.” I was a first-year teacher who was hired mid-year to teach at my alma mater. The principal and vice-principal thought I was crazy to make such a request after the junior class had single-handedly forced two teachers to resign in as little as four months. But I was young, cocky, and knew what the students and families needed; a person who would listen, and they would be able to trust. How did I know this? I was a high school student with the same needs.

The field of education goes through many changes, and if you stay in it long enough, you will see the recycling of theories. One thing that hasn’t changed: the “Golden Rule” in life, which says to treat others as you wish to be treated.

Becoming a new teacher wasn’t easy, but not difficult. Teachers can learn content, but what is difficult to determine is the heart. My heart was with my students for I was the kid that all but one maybe two teachers believed would never amount to anything in life. With this passion for all my students, my purpose was to create a community of learners. Not just within my classroom, but with my student’s families as well.

Families and Schools

If teachers see parents walk on school grounds during the day, often the teachers believe that the kid of the parent did something wrong. If we call home (do we call home anymore?) it is usually something negative, or it is a recording from the school or district asking for money, sharing of the bell schedule, or an invitation to attend a meeting. This lack of school-home communication by teachers (meaning a phone call, not a robotic generated text message) is most often true today, as it was when I was a K-12 student. As a high school teacher, I wished to change this by implementing communication strategies with families/parents (I use the terms “family” and “parent(s)” interchangeably for many K-12 students are not living with their biological mother and father) to purposely create a learning community for my high school classroom.

Active Teaching

At both the private, parochial high school and the inner-city high school in Los Angeles Unified School District, I implemented these same simple strategies to create a trust to build student academic success.

First, I collected the phone numbers of all the students’ parents. I did this by asking the students by way of a survey at the beginning of the year that allowed students to describe to me who they were. By asking and sharing about myself, students were able to find similarities with me, their teacher. By having the surveys, I also learned items about my students about their likes, dislikes, goals, aspirations, etc. Reading what they wrote provided me with a visual with the face of my student (which is what I need to learn students’ names). Teachers that have used this strategy have altered their surveys to include an acrostic to gain their students’ names, along with writing something about themselves using the letters in their names.

Here is one for me:
F is for being a “Forty-Niner” fan
R is for “remembering.” what I have seen around the world, and use it for good
E is for “EdActs Global,” a nonprofit I founded which allows student leadership by building school clubs
D is for being a “Dodger” fan.

By creating this simple exercise, you, the reader learned a little something more about me, the writer. How valuable a tool could this be for you as a teacher with your students!

After having the information, I would call the parents and say, “Hello, Mrs. Sanchez, this is Mr. Fred Ramirez, your son Gabe’s history teacher. I’m just calling to let you know how excited I am to have your son in class. I see he is interested in sports. Well, I shall try to use this to allow him to do some research on something sports related in my class. If you have any questions, please feel to contact me via email, or call, or text at ____________. Thank you.”

My conversation was short, sweet, less than 30 seconds. As a high school teacher, I did this over 180 times, which took a couple of weeks to complete. Elementary school teachers have completed their calls in 1-2 days. You will find if you do this, parents will be 1) in disbelief that you are calling, 2) may wonder if their child is already in trouble, and 3) thankful that you phoned.

From here, it never failed that students would return the following day and ask why I called. My response was always the same, “Well, your parents care about you and your education. I should call to let them know who your teacher is.”

When my students would start to do their class work, I would catch them improving or doing something right in class. If a student went from an F to a D, I called their parents sharing, “Ms. Smith, this is Mr. Ramirez, Halie’s history teacher and I just wanted to let you know that Halie is improving. Not where I wish her to be at this point, but I trust she will continue to do well!” Parents wish to hear their student is succeeding. By providing positive reinforcement, a teacher not only gains the trust of the parent but of the student. When I started making favorable phone calls home, students would talk amongst themselves, then ask me to call their parents after receiving grades from quizzes or tests. Naturally, I obliged. An outcome from these calls was a decrease in my having to manage my classrooms. The students started to maintain themselves for there was an increased level of student-teacher trust. If a student began to talk in class, before I could say anything, another student would nudge them and tell them to be quiet.

Another way I created a community of learners was by creating student-parent conversations, 1-2 times a month, about a topic in history such as: Where were they during the John Kennedy assassination, or when the Challenger blew up, or to ask about the history of a family recipe passed down from generation to generation. By doing little things like this, when I needed to call home for disciplinary matters, the parents stopped, listened, and often thanked me for the call. Usually, I hear from teachers complain about how parents were defensive on the phone. When I asked these same teachers would respond that they never made favorable phone calls home. Parents will defend their child, especially if the child is telling us unfavorable items about the teacher. As a parent, I will protect my child. Why should parents trust teachers when teachers have not reached out to gain their trust?

There are other items I can share (I created an MA education course on families and schools for two universities), but with limited space, let me share that if you don’t do anything else, try calling parents for positive things early and often for your students. This simple strategy of listening and phoning home has been duplicated by high school teachers who have enrolled in my MA courses with great success. One day as I was supervising a student teacher at one high school in Southern California, I heard my name coming from a classroom. It was a former teacher candidate of mine teaching Spanish. He called me over, introduced me to his students and said, “If you want to know why I call your parents, talk to him!” I got a couple of eye rolls and smiles from the students. He was making an impact by creating a community of learners.

Of course, I received tension for calling parents, and it wasn’t from my students, nor my families, but from colleagues. They were afraid they would be expected to contact their students’ families because my student's grades improved tremendously by adopting strategies of community and trust, plus it didn’t take thousands of dollars of new software/hardware or hours of in-service training.

Fred Ramirez is a professor at Concordia University Irvine in the MAED program. Fred also organizes a yearly non-profit humanity project in Honduras where he takes high school students to work on community projects such as building playgrounds, purifying water, and other needed services.