Parent Night - Done and Done!!!

On Tuesday we had Parent Night for the Collaborative Teaching classrooms that will be running next year. This was an important night because it gave us the opportunity to directly communicate to the parents our vision and ideas for our collaborative teaching classroom next year. The pressure was on to be clear about who were are and our ideas because parents were given the opportunity to opt out of the program. We find speaking to parents at Back to School Night to be nerve-wracking with the sea of parent faces staring at you; this was like Back to School Night X 10. Take a look:

As you can see, we were pretty nervous about our presentation, but once we got started we were fine. Probably the most nerve-wracking part of the whole thing was our worry that the parents would have a bunch of difficult questions that we wouldn't know how to answer. We were so relieved to find this was not the case. While the parents did have many questions, we were able to answer them all and in complete agreement with each other. We've been spending so much time getting on the same page in terms of instructional pedagogy and curricular structure for next year ... so, so, so, sooooooo much time ... but it really paid off in terms of being able to field questions in synchronicity. So we are categorizing Parent Night as a SUCCESS! Go, us (hey, if you're not your own cheerleader then who will be, right?!!?)!! Whew, that's one thing we can take off our plates. Now, let's hope that we impressed enough people that we can fill our class for next year. Fingers crossed!!!

P.S. Here's the brochure that we created for the night:

From the limb,