The SUIS Qingpu Campus has always been very concerned about children’s mental health and development. As homeroom teachers are constantly interacting with students, understanding children’s hearts and learning how to help them face real-life problems are areas of paramount importance to the teachers. With help from parents through home-school communication, our Homeroom teachers have been reflecting on, exploring, and improving methods for effective communication with students.
Recently, the school’s “Spiritual Building” Psychological Counseling Center invited Tian Yinping, a mental health education researcher from the Qingpu District Teacher Training College, to deliver to our homeroom teachers a comprehensive seminar entitled, “Covered with love, home-school communication blossoms wisdom”; the seminar covered a number of child psychological areas.
Teacher Tian guided us toward an understanding of children’s common issues using real life case study scenarios, and stressed the importance of parents’ cooperation as a means of resolution. She also shared a variety of home-school communication skills such as, “building a bridge of communication with empathy, putting feelings first before issues”, “creating opportunities for family talks, discovering family needs”, “advantages and disadvantages, progression and regression”.
After the training, Teacher Tian presented her own book “Campus Tender Heart Technique” to the Homeroom teachers. Her training focused on the difficulties of home-school communication, specifically those related to diagnostic and proactive corrective strategies.
All the homeroom teachers felt reinvigorated from the process.
“Our homeroom teachers need to observe, think and communicate more, and should try to understand the hidden reasons for children’s problematic behaviours.” (Jin Qiang)
“When children have problems, we should try to address them as soon as possible. When communicating with parents, we need to think differently and tackle these problems instead of creating new ones.” (Yao Yao)
“It is necessary to understand the real needs of parents in order to make communication more effective.” (Zhu Min)
“Teachers need to tell parents all the possible outcomes and respect their choices.” (Chen Yuehua)
“When undertaking home-school communication, we need to show our empathy, understand their need for good relationships, and seize the opportunity for change.” (Yu Chenli)
“We need to think from the perspective of parents and develop processes for communicating effectively so as to solve problems.” (Hu Yu)It is true that, in order to be children’s spiritual mentors, we need to fill ourselves with love, light a lamp in their hearts, use wisdom to build a “conscience” bridge for home-school communication, and jointly protect children’s physical and mental health!
