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Key points
- If the goal is to change the teacher’s behavior, talk to them, not their boss—everyone wants a chance to change or explain their actions.
- Consider who is with your child all day—their teacher—and consider how you can maintain a positive and collaborative relationship with them.
- When giving difficult feedback, start with a positive, presume good intentions, allow for benign ignorance, offer a correction, and never shame.
In my previous post, I talked about choosing not to respond every time a teacher says or does something you or your children don’t appreciate—especially if you don’t think the situation would result in irrevocable harm to your children. There are, however, situations that you believe will significantly impact your children’s performance in the classroom or their sense of self. These are the kinds of slights that could alter their trajectory in life, and when they occur, it may be time to get involved.
How you do this is important because your child will be in a relationship with this teacher for the entire school year. My advice is always to go directly to the teacher first. No one wants a complaint about their behavior to be reported to their supervisor before they have had a chance to explain or correct the situation. Your going to the principal can communicate several messages to the teacher, most of which are undesirable and can leave the teacher worrying more about himself or herself than about you and your child:
- The power play: I have power over you and can threaten your livelihood.
- Distrust: I don’t trust you. If I talk to you, you won’t listen or care.
- Fear and discomfort: I am uncomfortable with difficult conversations, so I would rather have someone else tell you what I want you to know.
When there are situations of which you want teachers informed, do so directly and without condemnation, regardless of how upset you are by their behavior. Try not to berate or shame them, especially as educators are trying to regroup and recover from the effects of the pandemic. Shame is toxic and breeds resentment rather than cooperation in any relationship, so make this a teachable moment—not a threatening one. Help your child’s teacher sympathize with rather than resent your child.
While there is no one-size-fits-all response, some ways are better than others to get the results you want and to avoid those you don’t. The approach I recommend most often is one called Right Speech, introduced by Buddhist cognitive psychologist Marv Levine. It’s a particularly useful approach when telling someone something that could be difficult to hear. Let’s apply this to an imaginary scenario:
Situation: Your daughter tells you that her teacher does not like her. When you ask her why she thinks this, she reports that he dismissed her requests for help, telling her to return to her desk and keep working. She also says that she saw the teacher providing feedback and support to another child in the class who is doing better in the class than your daughter is.
- Start with a positive: When you approach your daughter’s teacher, begin with something genuinely positive. For example, “I appreciate the number of student issues you probably need to address each day. I don’t know how you have maintained your calm during the past couple of years, which I imagine to have been particularly stressful.”
- Assume good intentions: Then, when presenting the issue you have come to discuss, indicate that the teacher may be unaware of how his action was interpreted: “You may not have realized…” or “I’m sure it wasn’t your intention...”
- Share actual impact: Next, share the unintended impact of the teacher’s actions. “From what you have said in the past, it sounds like you think my daughter is capable of working relatively independently, but when you tell her to return to her seat and figure it out if she comes to you with a question, she is interpreting your response as dislike instead of your belief in her competence.”
- Suggest a replacement behavior: It is important to then offer the teacher a replacement behavior that your daughter would not interpret as dismissive or rejecting. You could suggest that he say, “I hope you know that when I redirect you to your seat, it’s because I believe you already know how to do whatever the problem is asking.”
- Follow up: Because you want to embed some kind of follow-up action, you can suggest a check-in after a reasonable period in which the teacher could modify how he interacts with your child, and your child would have ample time to reflect on and notice the teacher behaving differently. For example, “Since almost every day there seems to be an opportunity for my daughter to ask a question, does it seem reasonable for us to check in briefly at the end of this week or the middle of next week?”
In the situation described above, it may be that the teacher was interacting differently with the two students but didn’t realize the impact. Sometimes just focusing our attention on our behavior results in a change or shift. And, hopefully, the additional step of adding follow-up will make the teacher more mindful of and accountable for his interactions with your child. The follow-up is a form of social contract that makes people more likely to follow through with their commitment to change their behavior.
One more piece of advice is to consider role-playing what you plan to say with an honest friend. Ask how intimidating they believe your proposed conversation would be. If your actions could be misread, think about how you could soften your delivery while remaining clear about the message you are trying to communicate.
You are trying to present your issue in a way that is considerate of the teacher and less likely to trigger a defensive response that could shift the focus away from your child. You are checking to see if your solution seems reasonable and offering to negotiate a different one if it does not. You and the teacher are agreeing on a check-in to discuss how things are going. If issues persist despite this direct communication with your child’s teacher, you may end up needing to speak to the principal, but giving teachers the opportunity to respond to your concerns is not only respectful—it is in your children’s best interest as well.
