Students E-mailing Home

Although I only briefly touched on students e-mailing home in my previous post (after my initial post on it back in January), I wanted to expand on how I currently employ student-authored e-mails home.

As I noted initially, I was inspired by Catlin Tucker’s (@catlin_tucker) post, “Students E-mail Their Parents About Missing Work.” Situated in a workshop approach with a move toward standards-based grading, my process has changed a bit since its inception.

PURPOSE

While I liked the purpose to let students know that parents would be made aware of their work, I quickly realized the exercise was mostly for my students: we would be embarking on some self-reflection. This would be new for some of my students, summarizing and reflecting on their work and learning.

Contacting parents became a side-effect of actual class time to pause and reflect. The goal is to reconsider their daily work logs, completed readings and writings, and their plan of action moving forward.

I have had a good number of parents (via parent-teacher conference day and via e-mail) respond letting me know that receiving their students’ e-mail is a highlight of their day, or that they had seen growth in their student’s communication and writing abilities over the course of our first semester.

So, I do stress to students that the reflection is the purpose of our e-mails. Keeping their parents informed is a side benefit (I jokingly tell them that they can keep answering the question of “What did you do in school today?” with “Nothing” because their e-mail will serve as some communication). It’s also enlightening to see how students address their parents and get a glimpse into parent-child relationships when parents reply to me and their child.

MY ORIGINAL CONCEPTION

I had planned for students to e-mail home every Wednesday summarizing their work since the previous Wednesday and reflecting on their feedback and grades (and CC’ing me). For my students with IEPs or GIEPs, I also had them CC their case manager. For some students, I recommended CC’ing a coach or guidance counselor if I knew that connection or update would be beneficial.

For students whose parents did not use e-mail, I had them print the summary, get it signed, and return it to me. This is not ideal, but in my current classes, only two students do this.

On Google Classroom, I created a Google Doc to provide a template for my students, which included the following:

I provided time during our workshop in class each Wednesday. It took students anywhere from ten to twenty minutes, depending on the student. Further, I do have one student who will type in Korean and then translate it to English so his parents can be more fully involved. I suggested to each class that if they spoke another language at home and that they could write in that language, they were welcome to send it in both. I know this potentially puts more work on the student to write in both languages, but my one student doing this now does not personally mind.

We did this for about eight consecutive weeks at the start of our semester (we are on an intensified blocks schedule, so we started the first week with an introduction home).

This weekly process was helpful in establish routine, but I discovered that there did not always seem to be too much to say, and students were falling into patterns and not always fully reflecting.

MY CURRENT PRACTICE

I decided to shift to bi-weekly e-mails and better align the reflection with my goal to eventually shift to standards-based grading practices.

Now that we are e-mailing bi-weekly, I also have some more flexibility on which day of the week I will have my students reflect.

My recent template looks like the two that follow (the first is for an Academic, college-prep English 10 class and the second is an Honors English 9 class):

The key change here are my prompts. They are vague call-backs to our unit learning targets. In our daily work logs (which I am also revising and will touch on in my next blog post), the learning targets are clear (and they appear on corresponding assignments as well).

This past week, I made time to respond to each student’s e-mail (to the student, their parent, and anyone else CC’d on the e-mail). I affirmed some of their reflections, added any clarifications I found necessary (perhaps a reminder to finish an assignment or an encouragement to see me), commented on their work habits, responded to their reactions to their current novel, and also provided feedback on how to add further details for reflection. I plan to ask my students to refer to my response before writing their next e-mail. In this way, I hope to develop their reflecting skills.

Once I take a few more steps to grading in a standards-based approach, I will already have a reflective mechanism for students to examine their progress against the standards. This does mean that I focus my learning targets on the most prevalent standards of the unit.

MOVING FORWARD

I plan to continue the bi-weekly approach, and I also plan to use the e-mail as a writing grade. Each week, the previous e-mail’s grade would be replaced by the most current one. These e-mails are authentic writings to parents and also information for me on student learning.

When I more fully shift to a standards-based grading method, these e-mails will then serve as additional evidence of meeting standards as students reflect on concepts as well as showcase writing.

I would be happy to further discuss my process if anyone has questions.