[MUSIC] Welcome back. This is course 8, Developing Relationships. And this is week 4, Parent Involvement for Student Success. In my last lecture this week, I want to look at some of the strategies that we might use for strengthening parent and teacher relationships. What we need to remember is that there are many barriers to parents being involved and as you can see from this particular list, those barriers are quite substantial in some respects. The most important one however is the one at the top. 89% of parents say they do not have enough time to get more involved in schools. Now this is a particular issue when you have both parents working and working very hard and needing to have some sort of relaxation when they get home. So if we think of this particular issue and we think of the six different ways in which Epstein talks about ways in which parents might be involved in their child's education. We have to start recognizing that actually having parents come to the school might be a very difficult thing. We also have about one-third of the parents who say they don't think they can contribute anything to the school or they don't understand how the school operates. And so they don't know how to be involved. And so it's necessary for the school to start thinking about ways in which it can reach out to parents. Ways in which they might look at different opportunities for parents to be involved. And then if you can get parents involved, it's important that we listen to them. It's important that we feel like they're saying things that are important. And if you look at this particular statement from England, where families reported that they're not listened to. They're often ignored then we need to go better. We need to go further then simply asking them to be involved. We need to respect their involvement and to recognize that they have a contribution to make. So we need to recognize that it may well be difficult to get parents involved. But there's other research that suggests that parents want to be involved. If we look at this particular study, it tells us that 75% of teachers want parent involvement and that 74% of the parents say they want to be involved. So what does this mean? Well, it essentially means that perhaps teachers need a better understanding of how they can encourage parents to be involved. Another study suggests almost 90% of teachers believe that they needed to be trained in parent involvement. They needed to have more information about how they could go about actively involving parents. And even 92% of principals believed that they needed some training in parent involvement. So parent involvement is something that is so far been seen as being separate to the real world activity of the school. Teachers see there job as being in the classroom. Principles see there job as being managers of schools. We need to bring together parents and teachers in a much more fruitful way. So then if we look at the ways in which we might involve parents, Epstein has talked about a number of different ways in which parents might be involved. They can be teachers of their own children. They could be spectators, seeing what happens in the school. They could be volunteers within the school. They could be used as volunteers on a permanent basis. They could be employed in the school. Or they could actually make decisions and be policy makers in the school. So there are lots of different roles that parents can play, and what we need to think about is how is the best way of involving each parent in their child's education. In the last lecture, I talked about the six slices of parental involvement. What I want to do now, very briefly, is to look at some activities that we might use as teachers, that would help to improve parental involvement in each of these ways. So if we look first of all, how can teachers help to improve parenting skills? There are a number of ways that are suggested here. Teachers might perhaps, visit the student's home. If the parents are too busy to actually come to the school, maybe the teachers can go to the parents. And this would set up a different set of power relationship as well. Because instead of the teacher being on their home turf, the parent would be instead. Schools can provide information in school newsletters about how to improve your parenting. How to make sure that children are well-nourished and so on. They can go beyond just providing information, and also provide training. Bringing in specialists from health and other areas that will help parents to get better at parenting. In the second area, communication, what can we do? Well, perhaps the best way of having regular and positive communication is to have regular Parent-Teacher conferences where possible. Here, the parent and the teacher can just discuss how the child is doing in terms of their learning. These parent conferences might be formal, but they could also be informal. When the parent is coming to pick up the child, the teacher and the parent might spend three or four minutes talking about the progress of the child, and what might happen at home and at school. It's important that school policies and school programs are regularly communicated to parents. And even the parents are actively involved and contributing to the decision-making related to those. An important thing would be to have student work displayed on the school walls. And perhaps in the school news letter, photographs of that work would be sent home. So that, over a period of time, every child in the school would be able to point to the school newsletter and say, look, this is my work, would you like to come in to the school to see it on the wall? Necessary to keep talking with people. How do we improve volunteering within the school? Well we, first of all, need to let parents know how valuable they can be. How important they are to their child's learning. And how they can do various things that will support the school and help their children learn. There might be special events that you run that would enable parents to be involved. You might develop a list of people who are willing to work on particular types of activities and those activities may only come once or twice a year. But when they do come, you contact the parent and say, would you be interested? You might establish a parent room where people who volunteer can sit and have a cup of coffee, talk to each other, as well as work for the school. And you might, in fact, provide training to parents to enable them to understand how they can use their schools to improve the education of their child. I've mentioned on a couple of occasions how important it is that parents understand how critical they are in terms of learning at home. But unless parents know this and unless they know what to do and how to do it, they are unable to support their children as well as you would like. So it's important to provide information, it's important to provide training, you may well have to meet with the parents. And give them verbal support and verbal feedback in terms of what's happening. And you maybe asking them to do particular things. Such as make sure that they talk to their child every day, to make sure that their child reads or that they read to a child every day and so on. We then move to decision making, and of course, we can encourage parents to be active both in the school and in the broader community, to be involved in decision making. There might be some parents in your school that might also be interested in being involved at the system level or at a regional level within education. You need to encourage parents to go as far as they want to go in terms of their support for the school. We need to encourage parents to be involved in committees. And these committees might be within the school but they might also be community committees. What we're doing here is making parents more actively involved but we're also developing their skills, in terms of human interactions. We're making it more interesting for them to be involved in their community. Collaborating with the community is the last one, and what we're suggesting here is that we can provide resources and information about what's happening in the community. We can provide information about local health programs, local cultural programs and so on. We might even provide an opportunity for the school to be used as a resource for the community. So that our students might be performing within the community in an art program, or a musical program or so on. Or, we might host a community art show in our own school. So what we're doing is looking at ways in which the community uses the school as a resource, and the way in which the school can use the community as a resource. So we might invite appropriate community members to talk to our students about their experiences in life. We might have particular professions who come in and talk about what it's like to be a doctor or a teacher or something else. We might have students go out into the community, recognizing the need to balance safety with the benefits of doing this. But to see what's happening in their community. One way in which we keep in touch with out community is to try and keep in touch with our past students. To try and create an opportunity for people who have left the school to come back and to visit and to see how the school has changed and see what the students are doing. So what we're going to do next week is look at a broader perspective of relationships. This week, we look specifically at parents and families. And next week, what I would like to do is to look at the community. And how we might establish relationships with our broader community in a way that would help us to support student learning and student development. So until next week, thank you for watching. [MUSIC]
