Every Teacher's Guide to Working with Parents

Transform teacher-parent relationships into a strategy for children′s success!

While most parents strive to support their children with the best parenting practices, both teachers and parents often find themselves struggling to reconcile conflicts that can result in hostility, defensiveness, and communication breakdowns. In addition, negative public constructions of parents perpetuate this dilemma, particularly for those parents who are already marginalized through poverty or language barriers.

Working from research in three key areas-parent development and skills, social and historical family influences, and parent-school relationships-educator (and parent) Gwen L. Rudney offers teachers:

• Useful interpretations of parent beliefs and actions
• Compelling insight into what parents expect from teachers
• Key ideas that characterize the struggles that parents face while raising children
• Practical strategies designed to lead to community, trust-building, collaboration, gratitude, and friendship with parents

Straightforward chapters offer teachers everything from theory to commonsense strategies for working with parents to improve life and learning for all children.

Gwen L. Rudney, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Education at the University of Minnesota, Morris. A teacher of language arts and social studies at the middle school level for more than a decade, her teaching and research interests include classroom processes, teacher development, multicultural education, and working with parents. She has worked with student teachers and cooperating teachers in regional, national, and international settings. She is coauthor of Maximum Mentoring: An Action Guide for Teacher Trainers and Cooperating Teachers. She enjoys serving as the chair of the Minnesota Teacher of the Year Program. In 2004, she received the University of Minnesota, Morris, Alumni Teaching Award.