Students, parents, and teachers remain overloaded in today’s educational system, which affects schools’ efforts in building healthy relationships with the populations they serve. The categories above are heavily influenced by information overloads and the requirement to multi-task that permeates the modern educational system (Zarra, 2013). For students, it involves excessive pressure from the school system and even parents linked with remembering large amounts of subject-specific information, performing well on tests, and engaging in dissimilar activities to succeed (Zarra, 2013). The need to develop new IT and software use competencies aside from polishing their subject-related knowledge and managing school-family interactions can create an excessive workload on teachers. For today’s parents, supporting children in their educational endeavors can be challenging due to an imperfect work-life balance and household management activities. Moreover, the recent popularization of distance learning might create additional responsibilities for parents, including controlling the student’s learning process.
Schedules and culture support schools’ relationships with students and parents to a great extent. As for the schedules, the use of relational time frames enables teachers to dedicate the right amount of time to class activities without overburdening children (Zarra, 2013). With schedules developed to reflect students’ needs, the latter have the opportunity to participate in extracurricular activities, such as competitions and personal coaching, and spend enough time with their families. This strengthens teachers’ positive interactions with students while also improving teacher-parent collaboration indirectly. Regarding cultures, teachers’ acceptance of the premise that their duty does not end after the class plays a crucial role in supporting educational professionals’ trustworthiness (Zarra, 2013). In this way, positive school cultures can improve students’ and parents’ willingness to engage in collaboration. Specifically, the culture of teachers’ accountability to local communities can increase service consumers’ trust in the school system and encourage a meaningful dialogue between teachers and parents regarding strategies to improve adolescent students’ academic outcomes.
Reference
Zarra, E. J. (2013). Chapter 6: School culture and relationships. In Teacher-student relationships: Crossing into the emotional, physical, and sexual realms [eBook edition]. R&L Education. Web.