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Professional Readings includes reviews of recent publications and highlights of reports on current issues that affect schools. Your contributions are welcome. Send them to principal@osu.edu. Please indicate if we may use your name in the “contributor” credits.
Critical Issues in Family and Community Involvement
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This month the Principal’s Office highlights the North Central Regional Educational Laboratory. They have a series of well-researched “critical issues in education.” One series related to Standard 4 is Critical Issues in Family and Community Involvement (http://www.ncrel.org/sdrs/areas/pa0cont.htm). The site offers an explanation of the NCLB school choice rationale as well as a review of the literature related to parent and community involvement for elementary, middle and high school levels.
Much of the work of Joyce Epstein from Johns Hopkins is summarized. The six types of parent involvement as detailed by her research with accompanying goals for each type include:
- Type I: Parenting
Goal: Help families establish home environments to support learning - Type II: Communicating
Goal: Design more effective forms of communication to reach parents - Type III: Volunteering
Goal: Recruit and organize parent help and support - Type IV: Learning at Home
Goal: Provide ideas to parents on how to help the child at home - Type V: Decision Making Goal: Recruit and train parent leaders
- Type VI: Collaborating with the Community Goal: Coordinate resources and services for families, students, and the school with businesses, agencies, and other groups
Source: http://www.csos.jhu.edu/p2000/sixtypes.htm
Another excerpt from The Child Development Project (1994) suggests the following ways that schools can increase parent involvement:
- Conduct an initial needs assessment through surveys, interviews, orientation and brainstorming meetings, phone calls, social gatherings, or other forums--and ask parents what they would like to see happen at the school.
- Send home several different and inviting announcements, letters, and brief reminders about each event.
- Translate print materials for families with limited English proficiency.
- Initiate a personal outreach plan. Ask parents to volunteer to call other parents and extend a personal invitation to an upcoming event, or ask each family to call another family and bring them to an upcoming event.
- Establish a parents’ room or lounge that is the hub of information for parents. Encourage parent volunteers to create a welcoming environment, provide coffee, and establish a schedule of informal gatherings.
- Prepare a family newsletter that goes home with students every month.
- Involve parent volunteers in all initial planning for activities and events; ask for their input, suggestions, and assistance.
- Provide onsite translators for parents with limited English proficiency.
- Provide childcare for parents with younger children.
- Provide food or snacks as part of activities for families.
- Invite individual parents to play specific roles and become actively involved in planning and organizing activities at the school.
- Make sure that you do not impose anything on parents.
- Offer information, workshops, and support for parents to help them learn more about what goes on in school and how they can reinforce what is being learned at school, both academically and socially.
- Consider the makeup of your parent population and create a wide variety of culturally appropriate opportunities for parents to become involved.
- Use teacher conferences as conversations with parents, not one-way reports.
- Offer parents many ways to experience what it’s like to be in a caring community of learners.
Source: http://www.ncrel.org/sdrs/areas/issues/envrnmnt/famncomm/pa3lk33.htm
