Learning Outcome Ten
Learning Outcome Ten: Promote parental involvement and collaborate effectively with other staff, community, higher education representatives, as well as parents and other caregivers, for the benefit of students.
I think that parental involvement is incredibly important and benefits everyone involved including parents, teachers, and students. I have promoted parental involvement in my experiences teaching through an online magazine project on which parents were invited to comment and a parent teacher conference day I attended while at Grant Middle School.
I firmly believe that parents should be directly involved in their child’s education in more ways than just when behavior and grades are involved. As a result of this belief, I chose to create an online magazine with my tenth graders at FM High School which was made accessible to parents. I wanted to parents to be able to see the work their children and their peers were creating and be able to comment directly on the online magazine. I therefore used a google doc to create the magazine, which then allowed parents to look at the whole magazine and post comments wherever they pleased. The assignment sheet for the project informed students that parents were being invited to see their work, which motivated students even more. They were given an opportunity to publish work that was not created simply for grades and a teacher but reached their community as well, which Nancie Atwell supports in her book, In the Middle, when she states “a sense of audience—the knowledge that someone will read what they have written—is crucial to young writers”. Students took a lot of pride in their work and wrote interesting articles on happiness while creating an aesthetically appealing magazine for parents to enjoy.
I believe that one of the most important things to keep in mind when considering how parents play a role in their child’s education is to involve them in both positive and negative behavior. I was fortunate enough to be able to do this when I was involved with parents through an Open House Night at FM High School as well as a day of parent-teacher conferences at Grant Middle School. At Open House Night, I was able to discuss with parents what I was doing with their children as well as what I had planned for them, and parents seemed to appreciate knowing what their students were working on and towards. Participating in parent-teacher conferences at Grant Middle School allowed me to talk to parents individually, which gave me a chance to focus on a discussion about one student at a time. I was able to show off some of my students’ work to their parents, which both they and I enjoyed. I also benefited from meeting parents of students who had been struggling with behavior issues so that I could get information on how to best deal with the behavior. I took dealing with behavior very seriously, especially when it interrupted learning, so getting a parent’s perspective and advice was extremely beneficial and helped to improve student behavior.