Conducting Effective Conferences with Parents of Children with Disabilities: A Teacher's Guide

Successful collaboration between teachers and parents can greatly enhance children's educational growth and development.

Conducting Effective Conferences with Parents of Children with Disabilities provides conferencing and interviewing tools to effect more productive meetings with anxious parents and teachers. Just like parents, teachers come to conferences with their own set of anxieties:

• How do I start a conference?
• How do I facilitate rapport with parents?
• What can I do to reduce my own anxiety?
• How do I handle differences of opinion?
• How can I cope with a "difficult" parent?

Armed with useful strategies and ways of thinking about parents and families, teachers will be in a better position to promote empathy and rapport during conferences and feel more competent and at ease.

Enhancing the book's utility are numerous concrete examples and sample parent-teacher dialogues, as well as role-play scenarios and exercises to build conferencing skills. The Appendix describes a range of disability-related referral sources and publications suitable for recommendation to parents.

Available As: Softcover Book
Written By: Milton Seligman
Book Length: 303 pages