Involving Parents in Student Learning

When a TLN member asked for ideas about helping parents become more effective supporters of student learning, Ariel shared one of her techniques -- and an important insight:

This is a great question. I'm sure many of us have strategies we've used as teachers in our own classrooms with parents. I'll share one that I have used that seems to be at least pushing in a helpful direction.

Pattern: I began to notice that many parents actively push their children to "do homework," but their capacity in this role is somewhat limited. Students can easily lie about what they do or don't have to do. And many parents also feel that they themselves don't have the skills to help their kids with the actual homework, especially if the parents do not speak English, or are not literate or well-educated.

How to interrupt this pattern: I keep the homework in my 8th grade English class simple: it always consists of reading about 10 pages in a novel and writing 3 post-it notes in response (which I later read). I tell parents they can help a lot by asking their children to tell them about what they are reading (instead of just, "Did you read tonight?").

This opens up a dialogue between child and parent about literature. The parent can communicate with the child in a fresh way, and the child gets to share some of his or her school life with a parent. It also moves parent & child away from the roles of enforcer and rebel --especially in adolescence. English Language Learners can discuss their reading with parents in their home language, even though the reading is in English -- the characters and themes can be discussed in any language.

I would like to expand on this idea somehow in the future, perhaps with an evening book club that involves both parents and students in reading adolescent literature or even in discussing "issues," but I'm not sure if/how it would work.

In general, I see parents of adolescents struggle with the feeling that they are losing their hold on their children. This almost universal phenomenon is intensified when a parent who didn't go to college or finish high school wants so badly for his or her child to succeed in school, but the child struggles with all kinds of social pressure and may not fully relate to the parents' dream.

I've had some really intense three-way parent conferences where parents try to convey to the child what they have gone through to ensure that he or she gets an education. The child feels the weight of the parent's dream and wants badly to please the parent, but the benefits of an education are still abstract to most 13 year olds.

We need to find more ways for parents to get concretely involved in the schooling and developing intellectual lives of their children.

Please use our Comments area to share your ideas about increasing parent involvement in student learning.

Comments

[Mimi Dyer]

Another great strategy for increasing parental involvement with kids' reading is called "Read with Me." Not only do the parents and kids read together, but they create a final project together. The child's review (or any other prompt the teacher assigns) is on the left side of a triptych, and the parent's review is on the right side. In the middle is a visual representation of some aspect of the book and includes the pertinent information (title, publisher, date of publication). This is a wonderful, enriching culminating activity that can be used for students of all ages. I have used it in high school and colleagues have used it in elementary and middle school.