Technology for Learning

photo credit: redjar

Dr. Debbie Pushor from the University of Saskatchewan was the guest on Parents as Partners webcast tonight. She led a lively discussion with her message that we need to change the story in our schools from fortresses to places that truly welcome parent engagement.

I blogged previously about Dr. Pushor’s belief in the difference between involvement and engagement. Involvement activities are the usual suspects – the parent/teacher interview, fund-raising, the talent show audience – while engagement brings the parent into the workings of the school and the child’s learning.

Changing the story means to look around the school for those symbols that say “parents aren’t welcome”. Dr. Pushor related several possibilities: the visitors report to the office sign, staff parking only, no parent interviews if your student is doing well. Changing the story means building a different relationship with parents. In the research report on Parent Engagement and Leadership three themes emerged that differentiated the case study school as one that practices parent engagement not involvement:

We found that the staff of Princess [Alexandra School] are consciously working to live their positive assumptions about parents, and their beliefs abou tthe engagemtn of parents within their school, in practice. We learned that hospitality at Princess Alexandra is not about teachers and administrators inviting people to their place, but about creating aplace that is owned as much by students, parents, and other community memebers as it is by the staff and administrators. And we observed and heard about practices at Pricess which move away from the institutionalized, ritualistic, and often public interactions between teachers and parents typical of most school landscapes to an emphasis on building trust and relationships in ways which are much less formal and more intimate.

The chat during the webcast reiterated the importance of building relationships as a key to creating the right school landscape in all schools. One participant wrote: I think that all schools–public, private, charter–can build relationships. There are many reasons it might be harder in a public school, but nothing written in stone about public schools, and certainly not about the parents that prevent schools from building authentic relationships.

To the title of this blog post, Dr. Pushor made that comment in reference to authentically changing the school landscape. School leaders must play a role in changing the landscape, in setting the tone and beliefs for parent engagement, but they must walk the talk. If the sign says parents welcome, but in practice its still just for parent/teacher interviews, its not authentic. If parents are invited to participate in school planning, but left with the decision about whether the school fair is on Monday or Friday, its not authentic. Don’t just make pretty what isn’t working, truly change the landscape.

That is the challenge for school leaders. I think the bigger challenge is finding ways to support them at the district level and in pre-service training to do that work.