Parent meetings have been Brandon Lovett’s biggest challenge as a teacher and education therapist at Elam Alexander Academy, an alternative education program for students with special behavioral or academic needs in Bibbs County, Ga.
“You know, I came to education from the corporate world,” said Lovett, a former insurance litigation specialist for GEICO. “I’ve negotiated settlements with attorneys, so I found it a little odd that, you know—why am I afraid to call a mom?”
One meeting he had last fall—misbehaving son, defensive mom—was the kind that can easily escalate. “She’s saying, ‘He’s a smart kid; I think he’s bored. I think he’s lashing out. He doesn’t do this at home,’” Lovett said.
The subtext a teacher often hears: My kid isn’t the problem; you’re a bad teacher.
But Lovett felt prepared to cope with the defensive mother of the misbehaving student.
He’d experienced an almost identical meeting the week before—in a parent engagement simulation that was part of Bibb County’s Emerging Educators pilot program, intended to support new teachers entering the classroom from non-education fields.
Teachers participating in the pilot experienced AI-based meeting simulations delivered by computer developed by the nonprofit Branch Alliance for Educator Diversity, or BranchED. The simulations act somewhat like a “choose your own adventure” story—following how relationships with students and parents change in response to the way a teacher interacts across lessons and parent meetings.
In each simulated meeting, the parent avatars—each has its own personality and backstory—respond to the teacher in real time through speech and body language, as they discuss problems from falling grades to a fight at school. After each session, the teachers debrief with mentor teachers and their peers about what went well, or the point at which a meeting went off the rails.
“In-service teachers may get professional learning to help them understand new practices and research, but the opportunity to enact those practices in a realistic environment is oftentimes very limited before they’re expected to implement those practices in the classroom,” said Cassandra Herring, the president of BranchED.
“What we’re finding is that cycle of instruction, [simulation] practice, and feedback gets them up to speed faster and they feel more confident.”
Limited preparation
Communicating with parents about a student’s academic and behavior problems is one of the most common—and often nerve-wracking—parts of an educator’s job.
Done well, teacher-parent relationships help educators and families spot potential problems earlier and build consistent support for struggling students. But poorly managed parent conversations can lead to blame and mistrust on both sides without solving the original problem.
“There is this real fear factor to [giving bad news], and we all avoid these sorts of things, right?” said Barbara Boone, the program director for family engagement programs at the Ohio State University’s Center on Education for Training and Employment. “It’s not just about teachers caring. It’s really their sense of efficacy of ... can I learn to trust parents and gain their trust?”
Often, teachers learn to work with parents mostly through trial and error, not professional development.
Less than a third of states require teachers to be trained on effective practices for family engagement, and fewer than 40 percent of school staff who work with parents reported their preservice training prepared them to do so effectively, according to a 2022 study by the National Association for Family, School and Community Engagement, a nonprofit that advocates for better engagement practices.
It took years for Amber Chandler, a veteran teacher and mentor to new teachers in New York’s Frontier Central school district south of Buffalo, to build confidence to give parents bad news.
“You have to express to families that you care about their kid,” said Chandler, “to tell parents, ‘I’m going to make you uncomfortable, but it’s because I love your kid, so I’m going to make sure they’re not going to fall through the cracks.’”
Now, Chandler works with untenured teachers to start regular, brief meetings with parents early in the year, to get to know them around neutral or positive topics, like their students’ goals and interests. Knowing parents well before problems arise can give teachers a more stable foundation for difficult discussions.
Generally, teachers engaging in difficult conversations with parents have to reflect on their potential biases about the family and connect though empathetic listening, repeating and elaborating on what they hear to ensure understanding. Then they can lead parents through decisionmaking to support the student, said Margaret Caspe, a senior researcher and co-director of the Pre-Service Family Engagement Consortium, a NAFSCE initiative.
That’s harder to do when dealing with parents who are confused, angry, upset, or aggressive.
In a conversation about a difficult topic, “educators need to be able take a step back and reflect on their own emotions,” Caspe said. “What is it that the parent is bringing to the conversation that might make you feel anxiety, and what are the different ways that you can manage that?”
Tech-powered practice with parents
As part of the Emerging Educators program in Macon, this year Lovett and other new teachers practiced meeting with parents using the AI-generated simulations. BranchED, the nonprofit simulation developer, used hundreds of videos and transcripts of teacher lessons and meetings to train animated AI avatars for the scenarios.
Teachers’ live mentors can “adjust the sassiness” of the computer simulations to give new teachers more practice responding to parents who get defensive, upset, or angry.
Over the 2025-26 school year, the pilot teachers had six virtual sessions with simulations and four face-to-face meetings with mentors and teacher colleagues to discuss them, said Holly Huynh, Bibb County schools’ head of talent. Huynh considered the parent-communication practice one of the most valuable parts of the simulations because “that real ease of interacting with parents, it’s not second nature ... and it’s rarely taught explicitly,” she said. “But we were giving them that explicit instruction to build strong relationships with family.”
Latracia Tolbert, a grade 1-5 special education teacher in the pilot, has meetings with parents all the time but “just seeing the different simulations was a real eye-opener for me.”
“It’s really good to get feedback on the questions you ask, because you never know how a parent is going to respond when you tell them something about their child,” she said. Now, Tolbert says, she’s gotten better at framing students’ strengths before challenges and laying out positive steps for parents, rather than focusing on problems.
Rolly Garcia, a 6th grade science teacher at Howard Middle School in Bibb County, teaches many struggling students, and parents often think their kids are in trouble when he calls. “We have to deliver the answers in a way that the parent will not feel like the teacher is the problem or the student is the problem,” he said.
The simulation pilot has helped him develop clearer strategies for how to respond to parent concerns while keeping them focused on what they can do to help their student. “It makes me feel prepared to have some options on how to deliver the answers in a way that the parent will feel the conversation is about helping their students succeed,” he said.
The week before Lovett’s parent meeting, he practiced in a “high-pushback” meeting; the sim parent aggressively argued her child was misbehaving because he was bright and bored in class.
Recalling the simulation helped Lovett anticipate his real student’s mother’s concerns and redirect parts of the conversation that threatened to escalate.
“I was able to pause, hear what she was saying, validate it, and say, ‘Yes, we can work on getting him additional enrichment and challenges so that he won’t put his head down or ignore the lesson.’ And we got to sit and talk about what motivates him, too.”
Over the last few months, Lovett said, he has had an easier time keeping the mother up to date about her son’s progress and challenges. Last week, in the middle of the end-of-year crush, he learned from a school leader that the mother had praised his support and advocacy for her son.
“It just made me feel I had gotten on the right track with her and now we’re aligned in what we want for her son,” he said. “And it’s showing through his behavior and his grades.”
