Evidence on fostering communication competence from the medical context: Which conclusions can be drawn on the education of teachers regarding conducting teacher-parent conversations?

Despite professional communication with and counselling of parents is an important task of teachers, research on teacher education has so far generated only limited evidence on how respective competencies of teachers can be effectively fostered in teacher education. Conversations between physicians and patients are comparable to parent-teacher conversations regarding several key aspects; on top of that, rich empirical research on communication training exists in the field of medical education. Hence, in the present contribution, we summarize evidence from medical education and comparatively apply it to the current state of research in teacher education. In that, we focus upon three questions: When should respective didactic programmes be implemented and how long should they be? Which didactic methods should be used? And to which extent can training effects assumed to be sustainable? From a summary and discussion of the results, we draw didactic and research-related conclusions.     «

Despite professional communication with and counselling of parents is an important task of teachers, research on teacher education has so far generated only limited evidence on how respective competencies of teachers can be effectively fostered in teacher education. Conversations between physicians and patients are comparable to parent-teacher conversations regarding several key aspects; on top of that, rich empirical research on communication training exists in the field of medical education....     »