As we all proceed into this new school year, before routines and patterns in schools are well-established and seemingly unchangeable, I would like to invite the parent body in every school to ask an important set of questions:
What activities are filling our time? Why are we doing them? Who are they serving? What is the result?
How are these example activities reflective of the kind of work you do?
- the development and implementation of a school council survey to determine/understand the needs of the school community,
- training on the advisory roles of the council,
- the development of Bylaws to govern operations e.g. Code of Ethics/Conduct, Roles & Responsibilities, Communication Protocols & Reporting, Terms of Office, Meeting Schedules and Agendas.
How much of your time is consumed by tasks of governance and the administration of organizational structures, of procedures, of reporting? What legislation, policy, guidelines or accountability measures require from you this time and activity? What have the results of this time and activity been for your children?
The purpose for the current emphasis on increasing parent engagement in schooling is to enhance student achievement and other educational outcomes. The Ministry of Education in Ontario, through such initiatives as the establishment of a Parent Involvement Policy, a Parent Engagement Office, Parent Involvement Councils and the previous Provincial Parent Board, has been very clear about this purpose. The important question, then, is after countless hours of time and energy invested into activities such as the examples I listed above: Are more parents engaged in their children’s schooling? Are parents more engaged in their children’s schooling? How is this engagement impacting student achievement and other educational outcomes?
Too often I think we ask ourselves “Are we doing things right?” instead of asking ourselves, “Are we doing the right things?” In a recent article I read by Nel Noddings (2009), she asserts that we concern ourselves with accountability in schools when our concern instead should be with responsibility. She states that accountability points upward in the power chain to authorities, to demonstrating to those in power we are doing the things we have been mandated to do. In contrast, responsibility points downward in the power chain, to attending to the legitimate needs of those placed in our care. Are the schooling processes we are engaged in as parents the work of accountability or the work of responsibility?
In the September 21, 2009 edition of the Toronto Sun, Moira Macdonald’s column highlighted the work being done at H.J. Alexander School in Toronto to enhance student achievement. Macdonald notes that as well as outperforming the provincial average on student achievement results and scoring in the 99th percentile in the C.D. Howe Institute’s analysis of school quality for overcoming socio-economic factors and other challenges to student success, parent engagement also sets the school apart. Here are three specific things she cites as happening:
“Besides a near-scientific attention to individual children’s assessment data and strategies and supports to bring them along, parents are courted to understand what their children are working on and what’s needed at home to help them.”
“Parents are brought in for curriculum nights organized by grade, and last year Grade 3 parents were brought in two months before the test to go over what the test and different levels of achievement might look like.”
“Parents are also asked to attend meetings to brainstorm customized teaching strategies to help their own child.”
These parent engagement activities are acts of responsibility – acts which attend to the legitimate needs of those placed in our care. They are the acts which, according to research, make a difference. Henderson and Mapp (2002) assert, “Parent and community involvement that is linked to student learning has a greater effect on achievement than more general forms of involvement” (p. 38). The key words here are linked to student learning. In Jeynes’ meta-analysis (2005), he found it was not particular parent actions – such as attending school functions – that yielded the statistically significant effect sizes in gains in student achievement. Instead, it was things which created “an educationally oriented ambiance” – a sense of support and standards in the child’s mind – which produced the strongest results.
When I consider what H.J. Alexander School is doing to engage parents, three things immediately strike me:
- Parents and staff are both given important information, and the opportunity to discuss it.
- Parent meetings are about learning. They are purposeful (curriculum-oriented), specific (what different levels of learning might look like) and relational (done in grade level groupings).
- Parents’ knowledge of their child and how that child learns is considered important to school planning and to teaching.
Parent and community engagement at H.J. Alexander School is clearly linked to student learning and it is having a demonstrable effect on achievement. What they are doing, why they are doing it, for whom, and the results they are getting all speak to their sense of responsibility to children and to learning.
Time is often our greatest resource and, like any resource, it is finite. Knowing that there is only so much we can do with the time we have, let’s continue to ask ourselves if we are doing the things that are most important to engaging more parents, to enabling parents to be more engaged in student learning, and to enhancing student achievement and other educational outcomes.
Popularity: 8%
Leave a Reply