Help Parents Be Participators (not Spectators) in their Child's Education

I have a goal.  I want twice-yearly parent teacher conferences to be a thing of the past.  I want the concept of parent-teacher interviews to be absolutely redundant.  Do I like meeting with parents? Of course!  It is one of the most important things that we can do in education.  Do I like discussing their children? Absolutely.  Who doesn't like to talk about their children? Do we want parents to come in to our schools? Without question.  Our home is their home.  But with a goal of OVERCOMMUNICATION with our parents, I want every day and every night to be considered a 'parent teacher conference' so that parents can be participators, not spectators, in their child's education.

One of the most convenient scapegoats in education is highlighted when we blame parents for the misgivings of children in our schools. The PARENTS need to be more involved.  The PARENTS are over-involved. The PARENTS need to discipline their kids.  The PARENTS need to teach these kids some manners.  The PARENTS need to step back and let their children take responsibility for their actions. Why can't these PARENTS just TRUST us to do our job?

As you might have guessed from my last post, my daughters (and my brilliant wife, of course) are the most precious people in my life.  Call me crazy, but I make my 2 1/2 year old hold my hand whenever we are in a parking lot, or whenever a car is remotely approaching us on our quiet street.  I make sure when she eats stuff that she chews it thoroughly so she won't choke.  I have secured our flat screen TV to it's stand on that one in a million chance that it might tip over and hurt her.  Book shelves are secured, there are gates everywhere, doorknobs have those childproof things on them, cupboards are clipped shut, pills are safely stowed,and cleaning chemicals are out of reach.  I am a neurotic Dad, right?  Wrong.  I just want to keep my children out of harm's way.  And judging from the books that I have read about parenting and childproofing your house, and the number of books on these sorts of things at Chapters or on Amazon, I am confident that I am not the only parent that wants to protect their children.

So perhaps a better question than any of the ones above is "Why SHOULD any parent trust us to do our job?".   The answer to this is pretty clear.  They SHOULDN'T.  At least not until we have earned their trust.  And we all know that the key to establishing this trust is to create clear lines of communication with parents so that our parents know that we care about their most precious commodity, and that they know that they are partners, not spectators, in their children's education.

We have to ask ourselves, how do we really involve parents in our schools?  I say this from a high school perspective, because when I talk to my elementary colleagues, I hear that parents are much more involved at that level.  But at high school, I often wonder, do our actions REALLY indicate that we truly want parents involved, or do we just want them to give their kids a kick in the pants when they don't do their homework.

Recently, we used Google Docs to create an online survey for our parents.  We have a relatively large school of more than 1400 students and 800 families, and we were thrilled to get responses from nearly a quarter of them (which is by leaps and bounds the largest response that we have gotten). One of the most common answers that we got to "things that our school could improve upon" was communication with home.
When we asked what parents needed to know, things like 'progress', 'how my child is doing', and 'marks' came back among many other things.

This made me think about some things that we can do to make parents more of a partner in their student's education.  I came up with a few things for us.

1) Have a communication protocol for our important events at the school:
We are completely changing the way that we are going to communicate messages from our school.  We have gotten rid of paper newsletters, and are sending these out online.  We have created a communication protocol that will take advantage of numerous applications including email, Twitter, Facebook, Buzz, Tumblr and other means to try to connect to our student, parent and alumni community in as many was as we possibly can.

2) Use a marks program that can easily email progress reports to parents:
Interim reports sent home with kids have very little value.  Most reluctant learners are even more reluctant to take a progress report home that demonstrates a lack of progress.  Often time, these paper-based reports line the wastebaskets of the school, and sometimes are sent home at a point that makes it too late for students and their parents to do much about it.  We have stopped waiting for the BCesis system utilized by schools in British Columbia, and most of our teachers are using a program that they can easily send home progress reports on a weekly basis.  Parents appreciate this because they can constantly keep track of their students, and teachers appreciate being able to keep parents in the loop.  One of our fabulous teachers makes his first assignment only submittable by parents!  This way he gets their emails right away.

3) Have an intervention system in place that gets parents involved as soon as their student is struggling:
A report card should never report something that a parent does not already know.  We put in an after school Academic Intervention system for students to complete missing learning outcomes that takes place after school Monday thru Thursday.  Part of this program involves teachers contacting parents at home so that they can be put into our AI program.  We use a referral slip that we send home with the student--if this doesn't work, many of our teachers will have the student use their cell phone in class to call the parents at home directly.  It is pretty neat, because parents always take calls from their student's phone.

4) Involve parents in the planning and goal setting for our school
This year, we created a School Improvement Plan Blog that allows our parents to see and be involved with the entire process of developing our SIP.  We feel that students, teachers and parents need to be shareholders in our plan, and to do that, they need to see and be a part of each step of its developent.

5) Make 5 positive phone calls per week to parents who don't expect it
I stole this from Chris Wejr, a great BC administrator.  He does it on Fridays, and what a great way to make a parent's (and your own) weekend.  If you want to have a tear come to your eye, listen to the unmitigated joy when a parent tells you "this is the first positive phone call that we have ever received". 

6) Provide information for parents that is useable, and will bring them back to your website.
Recently, I found a "Parent Guide to Facebook", and put it online and got some very good feedback.  Parents like things like this, but don't always have the time to go and find them.  Tutorial sites such as the Khan Academy, Wolfram Alpha, LearnNow BC and many others can help parents help their students as well.

7) Have an open door policy and MEAN IT.

 8) Find ways to loop in the parents of reluctant learners.

This is something that I still need to get better at, and constantly am looking for ideas.  If you have great ideas, I would truly appreciate your comments.

So collectively, let's make the 'one-night-per-semester' Parent Teacher Interview a thing of the past.  If we can overcommunicate with our parents so they are partners in our education, we will have better schools where parents feel like they are empowered partners in their child's education. 

Ultimately, our parents WILL trust us with their precious children.  But we need to connect and communicate with them first so they can participate in their child's education.