TalkingPoints Community

In April 2019, Houston was named as the most diverse city in the U.S. by WalletHub. As I start each school year in Katy, Texas, a suburb in west Houston, I can attest that this is true. In the 2017-2018 school year, I had students from Turkey

I am an English Language Development teacher in St. Charles, MO. For the last three years, I have been able to work with every fifth grade English Language Learner in our district. In my first year teaching, to be honest, I only communicated with families when there was a big behavior problem with a student and for Parent Teacher Conferences. There was this void in communication and partnership that was not healthy to student learning. The families didn’t fully know what their kids were learning or how they were growing. I felt helpless to communicate effectively with my students’ families because I wasn’t fluent in their home languages.

Ms. Carter is a second grade teacher in Los Angeles, CA. Two years ago, her school adopted TalkingPoints and she’s seen a complete change in her parents’ involvement. Before TalkingPoints, Ms. Carter found it difficult to reach parents and get their buy-in, due to language barriers. Parent participation was around 50%. TalkingPoints has allowed her to […]

Mr. Khabushani is a middle school history teacher in Los Angeles, CA. He learned about TalkingPoints from his school principal and used it communicate with families in their home languages. His goal was to send more individual messages through TalkingPoints, since the previous school year, he had sent more general announcements home. This is what […]

Strong parent-teacher partnerships are key to supporting students’ success in the classroom. When teachers and parents are in regular communication about students’ needs, progress and successes, students feel supported, motivated to try their best and do significantly better in school. A study by Westat and Policy Studies Associates for the U.S. Department of Education has […]

Last year, Ms. Eganhouse was an elementary school teacher and building technology specialist in Des Moines, Iowa. She had heard about TalkingPoints from her graduate school course on building strong school communities and decided to try it out, because around 40% of her students’ families don’t speak English at home. In this blog post, Ms. […]

Ms. Rufenacht is an ESOL teacher in Fayette County, Georgia. She had learned about TalkingPoints from her district’s ESOL department last fall and has actively used it to communicate and build partnerships with her students’ parents, regardless of the languages they speak. Ms. Rufenacht shares about the positive impact TalkingPoints has had on her, her students […]

Ms. Cardenas is a middle school ESL teacher from Knoxville, Tennessee. She had learned about TalkingPoints from another teacher at her school who had just started using it for parent communication.  She set up her class and sent a few messages to her students’ families and saw the impact it had on her students immediately. […]

Ms. Monks is an ENL teacher for grades 1-6 in Oceanside, NY. She heard about TalkingPoints through an email from a co-worker who had started using it. This was right before parent-teacher conferences, so Ms. Monks set up her account and told her parents about the new text messaging program during conferences. She showed them sample messages on her […]

Mr. Brinson teaches 2nd grade in Oakland, California. He learned about TalkingPoints from his school and decided to give it a try. He used to use emails to communicate with his parents, but now he uses TalkingPoints to send parents messages almost daily. Parents have been responsive to his text messages about daily homework assignments, […]