What are teacher perceptions of e-mail as a method of communication with parents?
While asking this question, the researcher believed that the teachers who participated in the research were sufficiently knowledgeable about how the e-mail communication worked, and any responses were expected to reflect the teachers’ in-depth knowledge of the e-mail technology. Accordingly, the researcher expected that the perceptions of the teachers regarding the use of e-mail in their communication would be influenced by how they rated the ease of using the technology and their belief about the suitability of the e-mails communication from the parents’ perspective (Pillet-Shore, 2015). In addition, this question about the perception of the teachers regarding e-mail communication was also aimed at understanding how suitable the platform is in relaying the students’ work to the parents, as well as whether the teachers believed the e-mail communication method enhanced their professional image.
There was a general agreement by an overwhelming majority of the teachers, 94%, that they possessed the necessary skills for communicating using e-mail. This confirmed the assumption that the participants were knowledgeable and skilled in e-mail use in their regular communication with the parents. From the responses given by the teachers, 88% of the respondents approved the use of e-mail communication as an ideal way of informing parents about their children’s commendable work in school. In addition, the majority of the participants agreed that the use of the e-mail as a communication method would help in having effective process of communication with parents, an indication that the teachers had a positive opinion about its use in promoting parent-teacher partnership.
The positive perception of the teachers towards the use of e-mail in communicating was also demonstrated by the considerably low percentage of respondents, 24.1%, who hesitated using e-mail because of any legal concerns. In addition, 66.3% of the teachers did not think that using e-mail would lead to the overuse of the medium by the parents. Nevertheless, there does not seem to be a consensus among the teachers on whether e-mail messages are prone to misinterpretation by the parents, which raises an important concern about the parents’ skills in using the e-mail communication platform. Ultimately, whereas the teachers generally believed in the suitability of e-mail messages in facilitating communication between the school and parents, they had split opinions about its suitability in communicating adverse students’ behaviors, with 51.8 percent of the respondents disapproving its use under such circumstances.