PL Trainings & Resources

You’re naming a very real tension with Workflow Shift #9. Teachers want students to own the communication, but the logistics, especially at the high school level, can feel overwhelming. I’ll share a few approaches I’ve seen work well across secondary classrooms and districts that move the work to students without creating an inbox nightmare for teachers.

One option is student-created biweekly updates that are not sent as individual emails. Students use a shared Google Slide deck or digital portfolio that lives in one place for the entire semester. Families are invited to view and comment directly on the deck. Students update one slide every two weeks using a simple “glow and grow” or “high and low” structure. This keeps communication centralized, builds an ongoing record of learning, and removes the need for teachers to be cc’d on every message. Teachers can spot-check decks or skim comments rather than managing emails.

Another strategy is short audio updates recorded by students. These can live in a shared folder, portfolio, or LMS rather than being emailed. Students reflect on what’s going well, where they’re struggling, and what support they need. Families listen when it works for them, and students practice articulating their learning without creating a real-time communication burden for teachers.

I’ve also seen success with student-designed digital newsletters, created monthly or at the end of a unit. Instead of a class-wide teacher newsletter, each student curates highlights of their work, goals, upcoming deadlines, and reflections. Tools like Google Drawings or Canva work well, and many teachers allow students to collaborate with a peer for support. These are typically shared as view-only links rather than emails.

For teachers who want more back-and-forth family engagement, a student-family digital journal can work well. This lives in a shared doc or LMS space where students initiate entries and families respond. Teachers monitor as needed rather than being copied on every exchange.

If teachers do want to stay cc’d on student emails for visibility, one simple workaround is to set up an email filter (see directions to the left) that automatically routes those messages into a designated folder and bypasses the main inbox. That way, teachers can review communication when it’s convenient without being interrupted by a flood of messages throughout the day.

Across all of these approaches, the key is onboarding students intentionally. Teachers model what a strong update sounds like, practice together using sentence frames, and build time into class using blended learning models so this work doesn’t happen on top of everything else. The goal is not just communication, but metacognitive skill-building so students can clearly articulate their progress, challenges, and next steps .