User Observations & Interviews

Please note: all names have been changed to preserve anonymity. 

Teachers

Teacher 3

Ms. Morgan is a music teacher at a public middle school.  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.

Teacher 4

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.  Mrs. 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.  Therefore, she indicated that if possible, she would also like to know the level of involvement of the parents.  

Parents

Parent 1

Mrs. Read is the mother of several children ranging in age from nursery to 10th grade.  She feels that it is extremely important to be involved in her children’s schoolwork.  There is generally sufficient communication between herself and her children’s teachers.  For younger children, the teachers often send daily or weekly notes about what they did in school, and the parents sign their children’s assignment notebooks each night after making sure the children completed their homework.  Mrs. Read speaks to the teachers at parent-teacher conferences once a year, and calls or speaks to them informally every few months to check on how her children are doing both academically and socially.  It is easy to reach the teachers because they all have personal voicemail boxes on the school phone, and at back-to-school night they tell parents the preferred way to reach them, whether it is calling them at home or on a cell phone or leaving a message on their school voicemail.
One of the Read children, D.W., often forgets things in school, such as her spelling list (although the assignment is written down in D.W.’s planner).  Although Mrs. Read would like to be able to easily access such assignments when her children forget to bring them home, she also thinks that it is important for the children to learn responsibility.  Also, her fifth-grader, Arthur, sometimes receives writing assignments orally, which is a problem since, as Mrs. Read says, “it gets lost in translation.”
Although Mrs. Read feels that she is sufficiently involved, she says that it takes a lot of effort to keep up with all of it, and one of her challenges is making the time to do it.

Parent 2

Mrs. Crosswire is the mother of several children, five of whom are in school between grades 2 and 11.  She says, “I have no clue what they’re doing in school....It seems that you have to wait until parent-teacher conferences to really know what’s going on unless your kid is a talkative kid.”  She currently speaks to her children’s teachers twice a year at parent-teacher conferences.  She does not feel the need to have additional dialogue with the teachers, but she would like to receive notes from the teachers on a regular basis (perhaps once a week), just to let her know how her children are doing.  In addition, she thinks the teachers should solicit feedback every so often (perhaps monthly) to check that the work is on a good level for each child.  She also wants to be able to contact the teacher easily when her child is having a problem.  Currently, in order to contact a teacher she needs to call the school office and leave a message for the teacher to return her call, and often the message never reaches the teacher or the teacher does not call her back. She would like to be able to use email to communicate with teachers, so that the teachers can respond at a convenient time even if Mrs. Crosswire is at work, and she can reply at night.
Mrs. Crosswire gave one traumatic example of how a lack of communication between school and home had a negative impact.  Several years ago, one of her daughters, Muffy (who was in 5th grade at the time), never received a flyer to bring home about needing to go to the school’s other building one morning for a special activity.  Muffy was dropped off her regular school building as usual, but because of the special activity there was no one there.  She ended up being left outside by herself for 2-3 hours, in the middle of the winter in the cold and snow.

User Classes

• Teachers
  1. Teach core subjects
  2. Teach elective subjects

• Parents:
  1. Parents who are already very involved in their children's schoolwork
  2. Parents who are not as involved

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.