Small Changes Your School Can Make to Improve Family Engagement
As educators, we all know that one of the most important ways that we can help children achieve academic and social success is to form strong and collaborative partnerships with their families. Taking the teacher/parent relationship beyond back to school nights and report card conferences can help build strong home-school connections for kids. Having a strong home-school connection leads children to see learning in a more positive light, which prompts them to work harder and actually enjoy school more.
As an internal evaluator at an education non-profit, as well as the wife of a middle school teacher, I am inherently curious about how teachers respond to the professional development (PD) provided by their school district.
A few weeks ago, AIR Institute Fellow and chief scientist for literacy, Terry Salinger, wrote a guest blog for CLI explaining how the preliminary results for CLI’s i3 funded Model Classroom Project stand out in the field of early reading interventions.
It’s difficult, if not impossible, for learning to take place when conflicting goals are set, unrealistic expectations prevail, and support is lacking. School districts often focus on alleviating these problems in the classroom — for students, that is.
Sometimes even teachers need a little coaching. That’s where literacy coaching comes in.
Education is a critical catalyst for closing gaps in opportunity and achievement in an economic environment in which socioeconomic mobility is increasingly inelastic.
Ever walk away from a training feeling totally excited about what you’ve learned only to get back to the real world and say to yourself “Now what”? I’ve been there – I’ve attended PD sessions where the presenter has been really engaging, covered a lot of in depth material and even made links to how this could benefit me in my role but one crucial component was missing – the “how”.