Engaging Parents in School

Getting Parents involved in schools:

Parent involvement is a pivotal factor in student success in the classroom. Children whose parents are involved in their education generally achieve better grades, improve attendance rates, show higher self confidence, complete homework more regularly, and in general outperform students whose parents are not involved (Fuller, Benefits). But even with these significant benefits, it can sometimes be difficult to get parents involved in their student’s studies. Below are some resources we hope you will find useful in helping engage parents into becoming involved participants both inside and outside of the classroom for your respective schools and or school districts:

The Open University, a charitable university located in the United Kingdom, has released a free sixteen hour course which addresses and provides solutions as to why it is sometimes difficult to get parents involved.  The course aims to help teachers and administrators understand why parents do and don’t want to participate in school initiatives/activities, develop a framework for working with various types of parents, and prepare for the challenges and successes that arise when working with parents (Garcia, OER). The course can be found here:; http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/mod/oucontent/view.php?id=397461&direct=1. If the full length course seems slightly daunting, we have a few more resources that may be helpful:

Education Oasis , a collaborative website built and run by educators and administrators,  has a brief article that does a great job breaking down parent and educator/administrator interactions, and can be found here: http://www.educationoasis.com/resources/Articles/working_with_parents.htm)

Curriki, an open soruce education website, hosts a blog written by Anna Batchelder, an educational researcher, has an excellent blog entry dealing with parent engagement which has many great points along with multiple excellent resources relating to parent engagement: http://blog.curriki.org/2010/02/05/oer-friday-engaging-parents-as-school-partners/

In 2007 the Department of Education released a publication relating to getting parents involved entitled, “Engaging Parents in Education: Lessons From Five Parental Information and Resource Centers.” The publication is slightly lengthy, but is an excellent resource for all educators and or administrators. The publication can be found here: http://www2.ed.gov/admins/comm/parents/parentinvolve/engagingparents.pdf)

The National PTA also has many great resources available along with an online magazine all dedicated to parent involvement: www.pta.org. Make sure to check out the Bulletin Board where educators, administrators, and parents can all interact and discuss parental involvement: http://ptagreatideabank.ning.com/forum.

“Parental Involvement in the Classroom,” is a paper from the Journal of Instructional Psychology which goes into more depth relating to the benefits of parental involvement. For an abstract and link to the paper please see it here. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FCG/is_1_32/ai_n13670700/pg_3/?tag=content;col1 (please shorten and embed hyperlink)

District Administration, a online resource dedicated to administrators, stresses parental involvement in many of its articles which includes a study on parental involvement across the country found here. (http://www.districtadministration.com/viewarticle.aspx?articleid=755­) Feel free to take a look around District Administration as they have many great resources pertaining to administration in general.

http://www.education.com/reference/article/benefits-parent-involvement-research/

http://blog.curriki.org/2010/02/05/oer-friday-engaging-parents-as-school-partners/

Parents as partners

http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=1539

Author of the article is Jarrod M. Feight