ABSTRACT

Communication plays a critical role in building and supporting healthy interpersonal relationships. American teacher development standards recognise this and outline the importance of communication in relationship-building with both parent and student to create a successful learning environment. However, although available research points to the importance of a healthy teacher-parent relationship for the academic success of the student, few teachers in the United States have received the appropriate pre-service training on effective ways to communicate with parents. Not only could this impede the establishment of working relationships between the school and home environments, but this lack of training has also been shown to contribute to negative impacts on student learning. In this theoretical paper, the authors examine current literature on the value of communication training for teachers, barriers to teacher-parent communication commonly encountered, and current teacher-parent communication practices. The authors propose that a human ecological model be used as a foundation for establishing teacher training for effective communication with parents and discuss how this lens could address commonly encountered communication barriers.