Internal Flower: Understanding the World of Speical Needs: A Teacher's Guide: Best Practices for Communicating with Parents with Children with Disabilities

Who are your parents and how can you get to know them?

Let's not forget who the parents are. They are individuals who know their child inside out and should be treated this way. Parents are your number one resource in understand your students. Never forget to address any concerns with your student's parents. In addition, don't forget to show respect just like you would with the administration staff. You can address the parents by Ms, Mrs. and Mr. Keep a professional approach during meetings.

The Individual with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) , a four piece legislature literature, has allowed parents to be actively involved in their child's educational lives. In addition, it allows parents to play a major role as advocates since children with disabilities are allowed to have free appropriate public education, called FAPE. FAPE allow children with disabilities to enroll into public schools to receive special education and be provided with accommodations. Subsequently, you are more than likely to engage in a parent-teacher interaction about your student's education. However, this doesn't mean that these communications have been done effectively. This page will help you in approving your communication skills with your parents. As mentioned before, parents have so much knowledge on their children and this will be of great use for you.especially in Individualized Education Program (IEP) meetings where parental involvement is encouraged. IEPs individualizes a child with disabilities education by looking at several objectives to help them reach their educational goals.

Parents have rights as regulated by the IDEA 2004 called procedural safeguards. These safeguards help protect parents and their children with disabilities. These safeguards allow parents to do things from view educational records, participate in meetings, get prior notification of changes to their child's education, consent for changes or continuation of procedures, and dispute or disagree to educational changes involving their child.

Sometimes parents can become overwhelmed with all the procedural process to protect their children with disabilities when it comes to their education. Special education advocates can step in to lend a helping hand. Additionally, parents can become advocates as well. The Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates (COPAA), an organization helping children with disabilities and their families by making sure legal and civil rights are protected and enforced, host a training called Special Education Advocate Training (SEAT). SEAT is a formal year long training program to help individuals to become special education advocates.

We all have obligations. And don't forget parents are juggling projects, task and responsibilities just like you. Just like you would do in a professional manner, schedule conversations with your parents. Come up with an agreeable time to communicate. This way you are not doing such important talks in the hallways, cafeterias or outside where there is a lot of people and distractions.

As mention before, time is a very important aspect of our lives. So be aware of your parents' time. Be prepared with information you want to present to them. Make sure your ideas, concerns and questions are concrete and ready to be evaluated by the parent. This will definitely will help make your communication times more effective and have more time to brain storm as a team to solve problems.

Effective communication with parents involves balancing good news with bad news. A parent who has so many obligations may shut down or dread your phone calls when they know they will only hear negative comments. Effective communication will be shown when the parent is able to give a great amount of feedback. This will be very helpful especially if you need to one day talk to your parent about more serious matters, the parent will feel more part of the team and more willing to communicate.

A new perspective can help close certain gaps when it comes to school and community collaboration. Not only learning about the student is important, but their background as well. Take the initiative to learn about your school populations' cultural background. Take that information and make a cultural based curriculum where students will find some relevance in their education to apply it to their daily lives, this is known as cultural relevant teaching. Holding school wide functions using this perspective can help in the process of understanding your students and their parents. In addition when it comes to major social issues, you can help create a more just society by being involved in your children's lives.

Sometimes, some teachers don't know what to do with a child with a certain disability or what they can implement to help that child become success in school. For example, a teacher may have a child with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in her classroom. Children with ASD have problems with social interaction and communication. How should a teacher successfully teach this child should be taken into consideration. In relevance to teaching children with disabilities, the teaching curriculum should be seen as a very important and possible area to construct. There are many research out there to support teachings that have helped children get the most out of their education. Evidence-based practices are intervention strategies that are empirically supported to be an effective way to teach children with special needs.

Studies have shown that parental involvement in their children's education can actually influence a child's educational performance. Prerefferal Intervention Teams (PIT) which is a group of people that get together and collaborate on solutions to help their child exceed in school. PIT can actually help in resolving certain issues without it escalating to bigger uncontrollable problems.