The relationship between parents and teachers is argued to be an important part of the educational quality of schools (Mullins, 2002; Graham-Clay, 2005). A crucial part of this relationship is the communication between parents and teachers, regardless if taking place in parent-teacher conferences (Brandt, 2003) or in other situations. Yet, the ability of teachers to communicate effectively with parents is rarely part of teacher education curricula. This presentation reports the results of a study aimed at collecting information about teachers’ experiences with parent teacher communication. Its results highlight the importance of training becoming and in-service teachers’ communicative competencies and can serve as guidelines for the development of respective learning environments.

Theoretical framework

The relevance of training teachers’ communicate skills becomes especially evident when looking at the context of medical education: There, many approaches and programs exist which aim at fostering the competence of physicians to communicate effectively with parents. In various programs, simulated patients or role-play methods are used to generate realistic learning environments (Lane & Rollnick, 2007; Gysels, Richardson, & Higginson, 2005). Moreover, programs exist which focus especially on critical communicative situations, like e.g. breaking bad news (Colletti, Gruppen, Barclay & Stern, 2001). In reviewing these approaches from the medical context, the question is proximate why similar efforts have not been undertaken as broadly in the context of teacher education.
Various aspects of physician-patient and parent-teacher communication are very similar:
Firstly, the interaction takes place between an expert in a certain scientific field and a layperson. Such communication poses severe challenges to the competence of the expert (Bromme & Rambow, 2001). This is because experts are part of a community of practice which shares certain opinions and ways of thinking, uses a specialized terminology and communicational habits. As a layperson is not necessarily familiar with these, experts must possess good perspective-taking abilities in order to be understood by laypersons. Secondly, both patients as well as the parents of school children want to be provided relevant information which helps them to make the right decision in a certain situation. In the medical literature, such communication is called shared decision making (Charles, Gafni & Whelan, 1997). A professional who aims at being helpful for taking a decision will seek to find out, e.g., whether the client is provided and has understood all necessary information and is informed about existing alternatives. Moreover, effective communication involves finding a solution for the problem together with the client in order to increase commitment.
As a basis for developing effective programs for fostering teachers communicative competence, it is necessary to obtain more information about what the challenges are that professional teachers face when communicating with parents. A respective study was conducted which addressed the following questions:

1.       What situations are challenging and occur rather frequently in parent-teacher communication?

2.       What aspects of these situations are responsible for making the situations challenging?

3.       What are avoidable errors that teachers make in parent-teacher communication?

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