Open house, or “meet your teacher night,” is often the first chance you’ll have to meet your students’ parents face-to-face. Some schools schedule this before school starts while others have an open house within the first few weeks of school. No matter when you have it, you must be prepared. If parents show up and see teacher who is unorganized, out of control, and/or clueless you’re off to bad start. You need parental support, especially for the students who may act up in class or get low grades.
Here are six ways to have a good open house:
- Have a handout ready when they walk in the door – Have a well-prepared handout for parents that highlights the important info about your class. It gives them something to do besides stare at you while your waiting to get started with your speech. If they get bored listening to you talk, the handout might distract them.
- Know what you’re going to say – Parents want the basic information: schedule, homework, grades, discipline. Put a list of topics on the board and stick to it. The lets the audience know what you’re going to talk about so they don’t ask questions about stuff before you cover it. If they’re bored, at least they know how many more topics they’ll have to suffer through.
- Highlight major (fun) projects – Parents can say to their kid on the way home, “Doesn’t the volcano project Mr. Smith talked about sound like fun? He must be an awesome teacher.” Don’t spend time talking about the boring book work you have planned.
- Be positive about everything – This is a first impression. Don’t blow it by being negative about anything. Your class is great, the textbook is wonderful, the principal is perfect, your school is awesome, your district is the best. Don’t complain about anything.
- Use a form to get contact info – Have a brief form to get basic contact info from parents. Hopefully you can get their email addresses. If they cared enough to come to the orientation, you should care enough follow up with a thank you for attending. This makes your first correspondence to them a positive one. They’ll be much more likely to be on your side later when you have to send home a note about little Johnny’s disruptive behavior.
- Use humor – Don’t start with, “A teacher walks into a bar…” but do use humor. Alot of parents have memories of mean, boring teachers from their youth, don’t remind them of that by droning on and on about rules and policies and consequences.
