Det professionella samtalet : en studie av kommunikation under föräldramöten

The aim of this paper is to define and analyze how the teacher and parents communicate during a parent conference, to acquire knowledge about how the professional conversation can be used during a parent conference. Our study has focused on the teacher’s professional skills during the parent conference. Parent conference has traditional been a time for teachers to inform the parents about the classroom work. It has always been a one- way communication (Alfakir, 2004), but the curriculum stats that parents should have more influence and be a part of the school. The teacher needs therefore to form the parent conference in a way that creates a dialog instead of a monolog. If the teacher does this in a professional way, he/she would get the parents trust and make the parents more involved. We observed parent conference in school and preschool. Our research shows that the teachers use different skills during a parent conference to communicate and create a professional conversation. They tried to create a dialog, but most of the time the teachers still used monolog which is not a professional way to handle a parent conference (Alfakir, 2004)