Last Thursday our leadership team travelled to Nelson for a leadership "advance". It was great to be able to suspend conversations and continue them later without interruptions.
We visited two schools on Friday with a particular focus on looking at how home-school partnerships are developed as this is the area for my Masters' research this year.
We already do lots of things at school to promote the partnership between home and school yet there are always a few families that remain 'hard to reach'. Inevitably these are the ones that, for a variety of reasons, you wish to have regular discussions with!
Harris and Goodall (2007) suggest that engaging the 'hard to reach' parents has a disproportionately positive effect on student learning and achievement. That is, where schools have succeeded in engaging this group of parents, the impact on achievement has been shown to be greater than that resulting from the engagement of other groups.
The BES on leadership and student outcomes (Robinson, Hohepa & Lloyd, 2009) found that the greatest effect sizes were for interventions that focused on enhancing parent engagement with learning (as opposed to simply getting parents involved - trips, coming in to school, reading the newsletter etc).
What do other schools do to engage the 'hard to reach' parents?
How do you encourage parent engagement with learning?
Harris, A., & Goodall, J. (2007). Engaging parents in raising achievement: do parents know they matter? . Retrieved from http://www.educationbraintrust.com/news/engaging_parents.htm
Robinson, V., Hohepa, M., & Lloyd, C. (2009). School Leadership and Student Outcomes: Identifying What Works and Why. Best Evidence Synthesis Iteration (BES). Wellington: Ministry of Education.
Some would say that developing a digital portfolio is a way of engaging the hard to reach group but I have yet to see evidence of this. I have yet to see inside a well developed digital portfolio also. I suppose I am unlikely to do so either as they are all hidden behind walls. Nick Rate from CORE has done some great, sensible work in this field.
ReplyDeleteI think a digital portfolio would have to be pretty exciting to engage hard to reach people. WALTs and WILFs and some examples of kids' stories just wouldn't cut the mustard.
Maybe we need to get out more ourselves and go to whanau rather than expecting them to meet us on our turf.
Allanah
Hi Alannah,
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comments. Digital portfolios that I have seen are simple replicas of paper portfolios so it would be great to see how people were doing different things.
Your comment about going to whanau is interesting. I wonder how many schools do this? We have talked about offering to have 3 way interviews at home for those who did not come to those arranged at school. I'm wondering how common this is? What are the advantages/pitfalls?