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Ms. Morgan is a music teacher at a public middle school.  Over Over the past years, she has found that parent involvement is generally important and helpful in their children’s education.  However, it was sometimes difficult to reach the parents.  For example, some parents didn’t pick up their phones or their voice mailboxes were full, and some did not have e-mails.  Nevertheless, Ms. Morgan had a lot of information to convey to parents, such as concert location, times, and dress codes.  In addition, she would like to communicate with the parents of the children who are struggling as well as offer compliments if the students did well.

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Mrs. Krasny is a sixth grade science teacher. She also believes that communication with parents is important, as middle school is a transition phase between much parent involvement in elementary school and much student independence in high school.  She mostly communicates using e-mails, because it's fast and non-intrusive.  MrsMrs. Krasny also mentioned that while most people knew that there were parents with little involvement in their children’s education, there were also parents with so much involvement that they stress their children.  ThereforeTherefore, she indicated that if possible, she would also like to know the level of involvement of the parents.  

Mrs. Krasny mentioned one example of failed communication that occurred with a child in foster care.  The The child was most likely in a transition phase between foster families, such that his foster parents at the time did not care much about his performance in school and the social workers were not always with him to provide help and support.   Consequently, whenever he had problems in school, Mrs. Krasny had no one to communicate with to solve the problems.  As As a result, the child's performance in school decreased significantly.

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Mrs. Baxter noted two interesting anecdotes highlighting the communication channels in place at her children’s school. In one case, her son was given a handout by his teacher with the dates and times of the end-of-year exams. The child forgot the paper in his bag and never handed it to her. She found out about these exams from her son’s classmate’s mother a week before they were to be taken. The child (and mother) had to work extra hard in order to assure that he did well on the tests.
In another incident, Mrs. Baxter’s child was being bullied. Through directly communicating (over the phone) with teachers and the principal the problem was resolved quickly and satisfactorily within a couple of days.

User Classes

• Parents:
  1. Involved: Take a deep interest in their children’s education. Will want more information, more interaction with the teachers and will be more active users.
  2. Not Involved: Take a more relaxed and hands-off approach to their children’s education. If parental action required, will do the bare minimum.

• Teachers 
  1. Elementary School Teachers
  1. Teach core subjects
  2. Teach elective subjects
  Parents:
• Parents who are already very involved in their children's schoolwork
Parents who are not as involved
1. :
   • Have less students
   • Have more individual interaction with students
2. High School Teacher:

• • • Have more students
    • Have less individual interaction with students

Needs and Goals

Teachers want to:

• send information to parents efficiently and reliably.
• easily give positive feedback to parents about their children.
• deliver negative feedback to parents in a genial manner.
• know the level of involvement of each parent.
• keep a professional and well-defined boundary between themselves and parents.

Parents want to:

• get all the information that the teachers intend to send them.
• know what their children are learning in school.
• know how well their children are doing academically and socially.
• have a hassle-free and readily-available communication channel for communicating with teachers.

Information that both parents and teacher want to communicate:

• Academic:
  1. Grades
  2. Assignment deadlines and instructions
  3. Comments on student academic progress
• Social:
  1. Comments about how students are doing socially and behaviorally
• Administrative/Technical:
  1. Announcements
  2. Changes to schedule and academic calendar 
  3. Special events