Week Nine: The Ultimate Teacher Hack

I will preface this blog post by saying, I am so excited to share this reflection with you. This week I taught on Monday and Tuesday and returned to Penn State for a mid-internship seminar Wednesday through Friday. This week was full of learning experiences like writing sub plans and participating in a service-learning project. However, what I am most proud of this week, and maybe thus far in my student teaching internship, was a lesson I did with all of my agriculture classes.

First of all, I cannot take credit for this idea. In fact, I saw it posted on Instagram by Green and Growing Education (@greenandgrowingedu), a community of Agricultural Education teachers helping other Agricultural Education teachers. If you do not yet follow them, you're missing out!

So, here is the hack! Teach students to how to write a professional email which they then practice by emailing their parents about their missing assignments for the marking period. I'll say it again for emphasis...have students write an email to their parents about their missing assignments.

Sounds simple enough, right? I also made this mistake the first time I taught this lesson. I started the lesson by asking students what they use email for or when did they last send an email. Many said, "only for communicating with teachers" or most honestly, "never". I was shocked. As someone who uses three different email accounts every day, I could not believe students did not use email more frequently. I probed a little deeper and ask if students had part-time jobs, how did they get their schedule? They replied, "My boss texts it to me". Excuse me, WHAT!? From here, I felt the need to reassure my students that they would certainly use email more as they began applying to college, getting jobs after high school, etc. 

Back to the lesson, after we talked about the different uses of email, I projected three bad examples on the board and asked students what they would change about the three examples. Many were quick to criticize, but I reminded the students I often receive emails similar to the ones on the board from students. 

Next, I began to discuss with the students the different parts of an email. We discussed the purpose of a subject line, the difference between to, cc, and bcc, and how to professionally open and close an email.

Here is where I broke the news to the students. Up until now, I had just been telling students we were learning how to write a professional email and we would practice for the last half of the period. I was not telling them the topic of the email they would be writing. This was mostly for Zoom classes for fear some students would log off as soon as they heard the task. 

At this point in the lesson, I was very careful about the words I was choosing when communicating with the students. I would say, "adult at home", not "mom or dad". I would say, "someone who cares about you and will help you turn in your missing assignments", not "why didn't you do your work". I wanted to make sure students felt like this was helping them achieve deadlines before the end of the marking period, not degrading them for having missing assignments. Of course, some needed more tough love than others😉. In the end, the only students who were panicked were the ones with a lot of missing work. To these students, I reminded them that if they did not complete the in-class exercise, I would be sending an email home anyways and then they all changed their mind deciding the news was better coming from them than me. 

As far as what to write in the email, I gave students a template. The template was adaptable so that students with or without missing work were still able to complete this exercise. Even with the fill-in-the-blank format, students in my 30-minute Zoom sessions were pressed for time. If I would do this lesson again, I would definitely aim to use it in 40-50 minute class periods. 

Before students sent their email, I would proofread it to make sure it was going to an adult at home, that I was cc'd on the email, and that my cooperating teacher was cc'd on the email. 

I really like this activity for a few reasons:

1. It taught my students a new skill, a transferable skill at that!
2. It saved me the time of writing hundreds of emails home to parents at the end of the marking period.
3. My students turned in a lot of missing work by the end of the week.
4. The exercise could also serve as a positive experience for students with high grades and no missing work. Many parents replied to students saying "I am proud of you" or "I can tell you are working really hard in this class, great job". 

Lastly, one particular scenario gave me all the fuzzy-teacher feels. I have one student whose parents speak Spanish and Italian at home which makes calling or emailing home difficult for cooperating teacher. However, I am fairly conversational in Spanish and I was able to work with this student to write an email in Spanish to his mother. Within minutes, this parent replied "MUY BIEN" and you could feel the excitement this parent must have been experiencing to receive communication from school they could understand and relate to through the computer screen.   

#PSUAgEd2021 - How do you communicate with the parents/guardians of your students? What has worked or not worked?