Raising children and preparing learners are
connected and complex tasks that require collaboration between families,
schools and community members. However, collaboration is not easy. Far
too often, conflict occurs when these three diverse groups try to work
together, despite having the common objective of helping children
succeed.
Effective collaboration between people with
different backgrounds, experiences, education and specialties is a very
difficult thing to achieve. Teachers, parents, coaches, and community
group leaders all have different backgrounds, experiences and areas of
specialty that sometimes make it difficult to work together towards a
common goal. Collaboration requires strong and skillful leadership that
encourages participants to respect differing opinions and expertise and
to enable people to come to agreement on a common course of action.
Collaboration also requires team participants to be willing to let go of
personal biases and perspectives and be willing to serve the greater
good by supporting a united group decision. Much easier said than done.
Dr. Joyce Epstein, North America’s leading and most
well-known researcher within this field, suggests that children are
directly impacted by three overlapping spheres of influence – family,
schools and communities.
Each sphere has an area of specialty, but the
influence on a child’s development overlaps. Dr. Epstein contends that
the three groups can improve the chances for student success by
collaborating through a series of practical research-based strategies.
These are often referenced and sometimes broken into six or eight types
of involvement.
Here are Dr. Epstein’s research-based strategies to
unite families, schools and communities to work together for student
success.
- Communicating, ie. improve
communications. Good communications provide the foundation for
effective collaboration. With an awareness of what is happening and
what is needed comes an understanding of how parents or teachers or
community members might be able to better support the development of
a child. One topic of communications might be to encourage families
to attend various school events or special events including
concerts, sporting events or assemblies with their children.
- Learning at home. Enable
parents to help children learn at home. Parents can support student
learning at home by supporting homework completion, good course
selections, good choices in after-school activities and in many
other ways. However, parents sometimes need information, coaching
and support to enable them to help their children at home. Homework
seminars, course selection nights, and clear homework expectations
are just three examples.
- Parenting. Help parents
build parenting skills. Schools and community groups can both play
a role in helping parents to understand and deal with the various
phases of growth and development that children go through, and be
prepared to deal with some of the tougher issues like bullying,
drugs and peer pressure.
- Volunteering. Encourage
volunteerism and manage volunteers well. This includes designing
meaningful roles for volunteers, providing training and feedback.
This also includes fundraising for a purpose, and managing the
frequency of fundraising initiatives to avoid contributor burn-out.
- Participating in
decision-making. Encourage and develop leadership through school
councils or volunteer boards designed to help children succeed.
Develop goals, decision-making processes to enable people with
diverse backgrounds to collaborate to help children succeed.
- Collaborating with
community. Enable community groups to collaborate with schools and
families to provide extended learning opportunities and activities
for children.
Research from here in Ontario validates two
additional strategies for engaging parents successfully:
7. Fundraising, and
8. Attending school events.
There is plenty of research available to validate
these strategies as the keys to success in elevating rates of parental
involvement and to use to enable families, schools and the community to
work collaboratively for student success. On Dr. Epstein’s website
www.partnershipschools.org are examples of ‘promising practices.’
These are programs developed and used by other schools around North
America that are available for use to any school leader interested in
adopting them here in Ontario.
Schools can’t do it alone. Neither can parents nor
community members. As difficult as it is to foster innovation and
collaboration, research demonstrates that time and money invested in
solutions that unite the efforts of families, schools and the community
improves the potential for student success. And in its broadest sense,
isn’t that what the business of education is all about?
