Parent Engagement Rules!!

We know that parent engagement matters enormously to the education of our nation's children.  There are countless studies endorsing the influence of parents on things like individual student development, teacher insights to the child's nature, school site improvements, and even district innovations, expenditures, and governance.  Yes, there is a great need for parents to be involved, but...

There Are No

RULES OF ENGAGEMENT

for parents and school districts

It is a process of ever-new negotiations and conclusions.  There are new issues each month, and new players each year.  The experienced parents leave with a wave of resignation and relief, and new parents arrive with their Kindergartners in tow - both with wide-eyed wonder of what awaits them.

Thus, this relationship between district and parents is kept both ever-new and out-of-step as newcomers lag behind the level of knowledge necessary to be a relevant and useful influence.  Only when a few years have passed and the need for intervention becomes obvious enough to warrant an incursion do the parents then risk alienating their children by standing up and demanding better on their behalf.  As the years roll along and new players step to the fore their relevance and usefulness increases but only creates good and useful change when both the parent groups and the district choose to work through their differences for the sake of improving the education of all students.  Regrettably, there are no rules to govern this ever-new engagement and it is usually left in a state of frustrated disarray.

Only through an agreeable and respectable process can both sides be heard, be understood, and become effective as a teamed effort on behalf of all the students in the district.  Too often, it is the parents who are too new to this process and their tact may seem lacking at the outset - participating from a place of confusion and frustration.  Professional administrators and veteran teachers have been through these negotiations, incursions, oppositions, and discussions for many years and have seen the trend of their evolutions.  In their experience, too much dissension without resolved solution occurs, creating a natural reticence to having hope for a healthy process. Parents who care, but are not well-informed about the full extent of what is important, legal, and already-been-tried, will struggle in their ignorance.  Another factor is found in parents who may be inexperienced at community engagement as they often flounder in the choices of their influence; not seeing or knowing much more strategy than, "Should we discuss this or just fight against it?"  Feeling ignorant can cause many parents to more easily choose the latter response.

It is entirely possible to create a legacy-based process of successful inclusion whereby parents are introduced to the engagement process in their first year, or even before.  By educating parents (for the sake of their child's future) they can learn how to successfully:

• Understand the issues upon the perpetual table
• Understand their role and needed influence
• Become party to the work of veteran parent participants
• Know how and when to evoke and take up a new cause

In such a model, the community of inclusion begins as early as possible to reduce the lost years when good-thinking parents never get into the game.  Veteran parents will have formed effective forums for ideas and questions to be heard where no one is ostracized because everyone has been deliberately and effectively apprenticed or mentored into the culture, roles, and practices of the group.  The district will see the value of this inclusion and this mindful process of debate and elucidation, and support it with meeting locations, informed staff, and a centralized library of accurate information.  There will be a dedicated two-way process of exchanging ideas, knowledge, and solution-based decisions.

Measuring the "befores and afters" of such a program's effectiveness can create historical context to encourage the future arguments for keeping to it.  By creating well-defined and documented processes, even if there is a falling-off in the future for whatever reason, the groups beyond that can reach back and resurrect the once useful architecture, form it into something fresh and relevant for themselves, and start again.

Our nation was formed by the ratification of a Constitution that protects the rights of its people and establishes processes dedicated to fairness, equality, freedom, prosperity, and improvement.  The allowance for amendments proves an incredible forethought toward such a system needing future improvements to maintain its fit and relevance for a changing, growing people.  Any system of parent engagement would do well to review the wise and lasting examples of our nation's architects.  We need parents to be well-informed, relevant, and strong advocates for improving our education system.  However, without a constitutional perpetuity there is little or no likelihood for it to happen.

Creating Relevant Learning

As a student of organizational learning I have seen companies strip traditionalism from their instructional practices and build new employee development programs leveraging current technologies.  In recent conversations with principals and teachers from area schools and district leaders I have seen a slow progression toward the use of technology as a strategy changer.  More and more we will see this happen as the advantages found in technology capabilities become the advantages in education that solve problems for teachers and students.

For example, in one neighborhood where I have been working to move things forward, a large refugee population has been planted in the low-income housing available there.  The schools in that area were already struggling to meet even minimum expectations within the district, and these new families who spoke no English and had come from areas of very rudimentary schooling, brought test score averages even lower.  Obviously, teaching in a traditional manner - which hadn't been working prior to the arrival of hundreds of refugees - was not going to prove successful under these new conditions.  But, education technology might help.

Two of the mightiest strengths of education technology are digital content and individualization.  With digital content it is possible to create relevant lesson content from the most recently published sources.  This may seem a simple solution at first glance, but once the depths of it have been probed there is much more to take advantage of.  For instance, digital content allows teachers to use metro bus schedules and fees for math content, local non-profits as case studies in social studies, and each student's family story as an extension of world history. Teachers could use entry-level job descriptions for reading, research, report writing, and testing material.  A local business or Chamber of Commerce could be the focus of business studies.  Leasing and insurance knowledge could come from math and English classes, and foods studied in science.  Any of these knowledge points will help the refugee students acclimate to local customs sooner.  Also, since these students are the ones learning the most, their families soon start trusting them to know more about their new culture, economy, and opportunities.  This dynamic places an even greater need for relevant and useful knowledge to be taught to the students instead of the usual.  Even if the students are tenth generation Americans, their need for useful knowledge is just as great; helping them evolve their lives out of the plight and mire they grew up in.

With individualization capabilities it is possible to build personally relevant "learning profiles" for each student.  Just like a first glance at digital content, this can also seem like a simple but minutely beneficial thing - until we look deeper into the advantages it creates.

• When students find an area of interest it can become a path of interest and eventually a career.  
• When students struggle with any certain aspect of learning (memory, creativity, discernment, detailed observation, analysis, critical thinking, etc.) each new teacher can focus on specific practices to help solve that student's area of weakness or neglect.  
• When student's prove they can accelerate through some subjects they could be given a green light to pursue next-level courses before their peers.  
• When using project-based learning each student's contribution and end achievement can be kept on file for their future assessments - like college entry and job applications - like a resume does.  

Now, when looking at the whole picture we can see how education can become more and more relevant to each student's current level of ability, current interests, and current circumstances.  What if a middle school teacher gave a new refugee student a specialized course that teaches English using local laws, citizenship, and shopping for curriculum content?  What if this student's rate of learning was documented in her individual profile and what she learned was also sent to her parents for discussion at home?  Now imagine hundreds of students getting the same opportunities with their own individualized relevant learning.  Wouldn't the impact of these advantages create positive shifts in the neighborhood?  

One of the first arguments against such a program is going to be the amount of time it takes the teacher to create individualized content for each student.  Again, this seems like a simple and valid point at first glance, but once we dig into it a bit we see it differently.  Yes, each new course created by a teacher would be labor and time intensive, but what happens next?  Those courses are libraried for all the teachers to access.  They are created more and more in smaller chunks - segments - which can then be meta-tagged for quick access.  They can also be tied to an assessment matirix to analyze effectiveness and then rated comparatively. Eventually, teachers will be quickly accessing dozens of segments with associated test questions, combining them into customized courses, and tracking each student's progress in a fraction of the time.  (It is then a short hop to the next phase of the customized curriculum evolution where algorithms automatically analyze each student's learning profile and creates lists of suggested learning segments appropriate for his ability level and interests.  

The point here is to create relevant learning that not only captivates the interests of each student but also develops each student to a maximum knowledge outcome. Teachers who only see what they have already known, or can only see one or two steps down the road instead of miles, will resist these potentialities for better student learning simply because they themselves have not learned what is possible.  Perhaps the place to start is by creating relevant learning for the teachers.