Team Time: Building and Maintaining a Culture of Trust During a Time of Social Distancing

Introduction

When I began teaching elementary school, I very rarely connected with students’ families. In all honesty, I, like many beginning teachers, was terrified of parents. I didn’t know how to speak to a parent about an undesired behavior I was seeing in the classroom without feeling as though I was “targeting” the student or being too negative. I struggled to find the balance of what undesired behaviors I communicated to parents and how often. As a white teacher, I especially treaded carefully around behaviors if it involved a student of color. I did not want to perpetuate the cycle of disproportionate suspensions for Black students versus White students. I didn’t know how to schedule parent conferences or how to hold conferences. I had no idea how to tell families that their child needed extra support or that they were failing. I thought that I should be able to handle any issues I was experiencing on my own and school administrators seemed to agree. I didn’t think I needed to tell the parents, so I avoided the phone and ClassDojo as much as I possibly could. I was intentionally creating my own disconnect between school and home, but I was blaming families.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine how a school redesign project that began before the COVID-19 pandemic helped families and schools build stronger relationships with one another, leading to greater success in student learning. As students were unexpectedly forced to stay home and attend school remotely, the way they learned to socialize changed, which posed particular challenges when schools began to reopen with face-to-face instruction. Through a redesign project and a series of empathy interviews with families and students in a predominantly black and Hispanic school community, the students and their families began experiencing school differently, and redefining their roles as stakeholders in education.