7 Effective Ideas for Family Engagement that will get Parents Involved in your School
Professor Bill Lucas offers expert advice on how you can get parents and carers ingrained in the fabric of your primary…
- by Teachwire
Host an event
Gather the best examples of the most exciting projects you have undertaken over the course of the year and showcase them for parents and carers.
A gallery approach is effective, with students and parents able to peruse and admire classmates’ work at their own pace.
You might choose to have the displayed outcomes manned by a class representative so they can contextualise the work and field any questions that may arise. Performance pieces and videos make a wonderful addition as well.
Parental surgery
Host a ‘parental surgery’ once or twice an academic year to give parents or carers an opportunity to discuss any issues with class teachers or school leaders.
The ‘surgery’ can be generic, where parents are welcome to come and ask questions or seek information about individual needs, or you could hold themed events, where you specify that there will be members of staff there to field questions on a specific topic like supporting homework, encouraging reading for pleasure, supporting relationships with peers or learning through play.
Bridge the gap
How do parents at your school support their child in homework where their own subject knowledge may be lacking? Can you direct them to helpful websites or resources that can bridge the knowledge gap?
Target practice
Ask parents to set a target with their child. It may be as simple as getting up ten minutes earlier or something more curriculum based. Ask them to share their findings at a mutually agreed juncture.
Getting started
Share these conversation starters to help parents talk to their children about their school day:
- Tell me something you learnt today that you didn’t know before
- What was the best question you asked today?
- What piece of work did you put the most effort into? Why?
Home learning
How do you communicate the purpose of homework to parents? Is it to encourage dialogue about their learning at home or extend and enrich classroom learning? The level of support parents provide may be very different depending on what you want to achieve through the piece.
Build links
Organise a ‘bring an adult to school’ day to build links with significant adults in your students’ lives and give parents, carers and grandparents some insight into what learning looks like for their child on an average day.
Knowing what the classroom routines feel like, seeing how their child interacts with their peers in the classroom or experiencing some of the different learning strategies that their child works with can really help them to understand how to support him or her at home.
Professor Bill Lucas is the director of the Centre for Real-World Learning at the University of Winchester. Find him on Twitter at @lucaslearn.
This is an extract from Best of the Best: Engagement by Isabella Wallace and Leah Kirkman (£9.99, Crown House Publishing).
