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When it comes to meeting our students’ needs, it’s no secret among teachers that partnerships with parents are crucial. We may get to know students well during a seven-hour school day, but as teachers, we can never hope to know as much about our students as parents know about their children.
While parent engagement may seem like a no-brainer, getting it right takes dedicated and continued effort. Parents, teachers, and students alike are frequently frustrated by a number of roadblocks, such as scheduling conflicts, language barriers, lack of technology, and a by-the-numbers approach that doesn’t account for individual circumstances.
But when partnerships are done right, everyone thrives. By working to close the communication gap, Valor Academy, the school where I teach, has created a collaborative culture and a support system for all of us. Now, with a feedback loop between students, parents, and teachers, we have a robust picture of how students are doing – not just for the hours the child is in school, but all the hours at home that impact growth and development.
I recently participated in a series of focus groups with over 400 classroom teachers and administrators from some of Los Angeles’s most-improved schools. The work of these focus groups culminated in the report: “True Grit: The Game-Changing Factors and People Lifting School Performance in LAUSD.”
No school, including mine, said parent engagement was easy. But by evaluating a number of best practices, the survey identified actionable steps every school can take. Here are five simple, concrete strategies that any school can use to improve parent engagement:
Harness parent expertise about the community
In my school, we see our parents as resources to figure out how to serve our community in an authentic way. In addition to proactively asking parents for their connections, we literally open the doors by hosting a breakfast three times a year. We ask students and teachers alike to invite community members, and most importantly, we build a database of parents and community partners who are willing and eager to engage.
While parent engagement may seem like a no-brainer, getting it right takes dedicated and continued effort.
Provide flexible ways for families to engage
Scheduling represents a significant hurdle to increasing engagement between the school and the community, and my school has worked to create a range of opportunities for parents to volunteer. We have parents who help with morning arrivals, after-school fundraisers, and back-to-school nights, and we are currently exploring ways to meaningfully engage parents in classrooms during the day, including by chaperoning field trips and volunteering in classrooms.
Train parents on technology tools that already exist
We’ve begun a concerted effort to utilize all available technologies to increase communication and engagement. All too often, school websites sit inactive and outdated, so we host an annual orientation to walk parents through the website, including a program to check their child’s homework online. In addition, our robocall system notifies parents of important events and confirms their child’s after-school activities. And finally, we use a program called Remind 101 to send free text message updates to parents and students.
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Empower parents with meaningful leadership
At every grade, we empower parents to assume leadership positions and are training them to lead parent-breakout sessions during our monthly meetings. By giving parent-representatives a voice, we give them an opportunity to innovate and use their ideas to involve the community. What’s more, moving toward an elected-leadership model encourages newer or less-active members to participate in a formal process.
Make parental involvement fun
By motivating parents and students to attend activities together, we build lasting, meaningful, and holistic relationships between teachers and families, and we make a point of organizing events that encourage participation and engage all parties simultaneously in one room. We host Academic Nights – Math Night, Literacy Night – where parents get to see how their child is growing academically, and plan family-friendly fundraisers like ice skating, laser tag, and pizza nights that both parents and students want to attend.
Ultimately, both parents and teachers are invested in a child’s life and success. In order to invest wisely, we have to be on the same page – emphasizing shared ownership and collaboration instead of blame, and working toward the same goal both in school and out of school.
Angie Trae-Greenbarg is a fifth-grade science teacher at Valor Academy and a member of Educators 4 Excellence.
Then how come the teachers in your focus groups don’t agree with you?
http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2013/11/john_thompson_game-changers_go.html
Ooops! I meant how come 80% of those teachers don’t agree with you.
It was 23% of those teachers who didn’t agree with your report that smarter systems made a difference. The larger number didn’t believe that community outreach explains their schools success.
There are some serious problems with the framing in this article, e.g., the author gets the directionality wrong here in terms of who should be serving whom: “In my school, we see our parents as resources to figure out how to serve our community in an authentic way.”
In addition, I’m also not convinced that parents are truly “volunteering” at Valor academy; from their charter application:
“Parents are also asked to volunteer at their child’s school forty hours a year coordinating and participating in a variety of school activities” (p. 63). (http://laschoolboard.org/sites/default/files/Final-Petition-Valor-Academy-Charter-HS-03-19-13.pdf)
Would we ever require this of middle- and upper-class, predominantly White parents?
Furthermore, the report referenced in this article entitled “True Grit” raises serious questions about whether “true grit” schools/teachers truly value community partnerships:
“The E4E interviewed around 400 teachers and determined that five characteristics were associated with being True Grit schools. The only real pattern it shows is that about 2/3rds of the schools’ educators believe that it is important to have strong learning cultures and use data. On the other hand, two characteristic that were supposedly used to build grit – smarter systems and working with the community – were cited by as few as 23% and 20% of teachers. Are we supposed to conclude that the teachers at True Grit schools weren’t even gritty enough to embrace more than 3/5ths of the E4E agenda?”
The problems with this report are numerous (see EdWeek article attached) and as such, it should be thrown on the scrap heap with the other neoliberal propaganda being passed off as “research”…
http://blogs.edweek.org/…/john_thompson_game-changers…