It seems like a strange name for a report, but it’s basically a list of links to a number of case histories the Project has done over the past several years. Here is how they describe it:

Teaching cases can be valuable tools in preparing early childhood educators to engage effectively with families. Because the case method presents a story in practice, it offers education students and educators an active learning opportunity. The teaching cases highlighted in this handout involve real-world situations and consider the perspectives of various stakeholders, including early childhood program and elementary school staff, parents, children, and community members. Through case-based discussion, educators can enhance their critical thinking and problem-solving skills and consider multiple perspectives.

This handout provides a detailed list of HFRP’s teaching cases on family involvement, focusing on the earlier years of a child’s learning and development. The teaching cases are sorted by topic, gender, ethnicity, and age-group of the students discussed; however, the lessons in all of these cases will likely apply to a wide variety of contexts.

ABOUT HFRP’S TEACHING CASE SERIES
Harvard Family Research Project’s (HFRP) research-based case studies reflect critical dilemmas in family–school–community relations, especially among low-income and culturally diverse families. As such, the case method is a useful strategy for helping educators learn to communicate and build relationships with families whose backgrounds may differ from their own.

Here’s an excerpt:

According to the parents, when school personnel initiate and engage in practices that welcome parents to the school, honor their contributions, and connect them to the school community through an emphasis on the children, these practices then cultivate and sustain respectful, caring, and meaningful relationships between parents and school staff. While many schools place the emphasis on the programming portion of their family involvement initiative, the data from this case study reveals that when parents have caring and trustful relationships with school staff, these relationships enhance their desire to be involved and influence how they participate in their children’s educational development.

As I posted yesterday, Karen will be co-leading an upcoming Webinar on parent engagement.

“On June 21st, at 2 p.m., Eastern time, Education Week is hosting a webinar designed to help school officials, parents, and others learn more about the challenges that come with parent engagement, and about strategies that can help schools overcome those barriers. You can register here. Karen L. Mapp, of Harvard University, and Steven Sheldon, the director of research at the National Network of Partnership Schools, at Johns Hopkins University, will offer their thoughts—and then answer questions from our online audience.”

I don’t know anything about Steven Sheldon, but you know it’s going to be good if Karen Mapp is in it.

However, I hadn’t heard until today that Education Secretary Arne Duncan supposedly supports it.

Alexander Russo tweeted out a Reuters article saying:

“The Obama administration backs parent trigger.”

Since that was new to me, I searched online to see if there were actual quotations documenting that support, but I wasn’t able to find any.

A pro-trigger group in Florida says:

“US Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan has spoken several times in favor of the Parent Trigger movement across the United States.”

However, they didn’t provide any documentation to that claim.

Based on the other policies Secretary Duncan has pushed, I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if he supported it. But I am surprised that I hadn’t heard of it, and that I can’t seem to find any reliable documentation of it.

Does anyone know if those claims accurate? Does he indeed support the parent trigger?

great foto in NYC archives of 1950′s Brooklyn moms calling for more schl construction in 1950′s… more things change goo.gl/WXmiH

— leonie haimson (@leoniehaimson) May 23, 2012

Upcoming #PTchat: J.Michael Hall Joins #PTchat to Share Ideas on How to Engage Dads in Education

Wed., 5/23 9PM EDT

Fathers can initiate or participate in activities that help their children succeed academically. Helping children learn can increase success in school. The nature and frequency with which parents interact in positive ways with their children reflect the parents’ investment in their children’s education (NCES, 2000). Some steps that fathers can take at home, at school and in the community that make a positive difference for their children’s education have been compiled on the Department of Education’s Fathers in Education Resource Page.

It’s important to remember up front that both sensitivity and self-confidence are greater than any specific skills in paternal behavior and influence. Sensitivity is critical to both involvement and closeness. The closeness of the father-child relationship is the crucial determinant of the dad’s impact on a child’s development and adjustment. Developing sensitivity enables a dad to evaluate his child’s signals or needs, and respond to them appropriately. (Abramovitch in Lamb, 1997).

 J. Michael Hall will join us as our chat’s expert this week. Mr. Hall is the father of two sons and the husband to a middle school teacher. Mr. Hall has been a special education teacher, a teacher of the gifted and talented, and an intermediate and middle school principal. After realizing that he was spending more time raising other people children than his own he left the principalship and soon became an advocate for stronger parent and father involvement in public education. As an educator, speaker and founder of Strong Fathers-Strong Families, he has worked with more than 110,000 fathers and parents at local schools, Head Starts, and regional and national conferences.

 

Join us on Wednesday, May 23^rd at 9PM EDT as parents and educators share their best ideas on how to best engage Dads in schools. Before you finalize your calendars, make sure you’ve purposefully differentiated for all members of your students’ families.

Past #PTchats have been archived on Joe Mazza’s eFACE Today blog.

I learned about Boomberg’s newest comments from blogger Walt Gardner, with whom I usually agree. Not this time, though. Gardner supports the Mayor’s critique of some parents “who don’t care.”

Unfortunately, though, I think Gardner misses the main point. Of course some parents don’t care — in the same way there are some really bad teachers out there, too. But just as Bloomberg focuses most of his attention on blaming those few bad teachers instead of figuring out constructive ways to support most whom want to get better, he repeats the same pattern with parents.

I wish those school reformers who focus so much time, energy and money on blame put some of it on more constructive efforts for support. As a parent leader said in response to Bloomberg’s latest snafu:

“There the mayor goes again, blaming parents,” said parent leader Zakiyah Ansari. “It’s always everyone’s fault but his.”

“He should be talking about ensuring that there are more guidance counselors, social workers and smaller classrooms so schools can keep better track of students and the reasons why they aren’t going,” Ansari said, “instead of blaming parents and families that have challenges he clearly doesn’t understand.”

The article begins:

The petition, gaining traction in parts of Florida and around the country, urges education administrators to rely less on standardized tests and use other measures to evaluate students, schools and teachers.

It’s a good reminder of the importance of looking at parents through the lens of “assets” and not “deficits” (which is something I recommend for ELL students,too).

Here’s an excerpt:

The same concept can be applied to a school by looking at Hispanic parents as assets of that community. Rather than focusing on stereotypes with statements such as, “They don’t attend parent-teacher conferences,” or “They’re uneducated” or worse yet, “They aren’t interested in their children’s education,” school administrators and teachers should focus on answering the question, “What do Latino parents bring to the table?”

Perhaps we’re asking the wrong question – instead of asking how to empower parents by providing alternatives to their neighborhood school, why aren’t we empowering parents by engaging all stakeholders to ensure that every neighborhood school lives up to the quality promise we’ve made to educate all students? All public schools – traditional, charter, magnet – must have the capacity to build and capitalize on effective school-family partnerships to increase student achievement.

We should empower parents by preparing our teachers and leaders in research-based and culturally competent family engagement practices that have demonstrated positive impact on student achievement and school climate. We should empower parents with real, tangible tools to supplement student learning at home coupled with accessible, understandable, and actionable student and school data that serves to inform and support instruction and learning. “Your school is broken – send your child here instead” isn’t tantamount to effectively engaging parents in education.

You can read the less wise testimony today from others here….

This Week’s #PTchat Preview

It’s getting closer to June, which means summer vacation for many students will be here before we know it. Some schools require summer reading lists to be completed and others do not. Elementary schools and secondary schools oftentimes look very different in terms of the expectations for summer reading.

Does your school provide a summer list for students? Is it differentiated based upon reading level or grade? As parents, do you encourage your children to read over the summer? What are the pros and cons of such a program? What is best for kids?

To discuss these questions and more, join us this Wednesday, May 16th at 9PM EST / 6PM PST as we cover school summer reading programs. Join us parents & educators!

It got me thinking — wouldn’t it be nice if there were “Teacher Handbooks For Parent Engagement” for those same content areas that listed ideas on how teachers could involve parents in classroom lessons? I shared a few ideas in my parent engagement book, and have mentioned some in this blog, but not in any kind of systematic way.

So, I’ve got two requests:

1. If you know of any guides that share those kinds of ideas, please let me know.

2. Please leave a comment with any lessons that you’ve done that has included a parent engagement component. I’ll put them all in a list and post them later this summer.

asking the National PTA to adopt recommendations on homework – guidelines that will help educators innovate and improve their approaches to designing and assigning homework in our classrooms.

In June, the National PTA will meet at their annual convention. Join us today in urging the National PTA today—for the first time—to adopt homework guidelines that encourage schools nationwide to reexamine and reimagine homework practices to better support student engagement, health and learning.

Source: shareasimage.com via Larry on Pinterest    

The above quote comes from a new “meta-analysis” of scores of studies that found that parent involvement in student learning was the most effective intervention in enhancing attitudes such as:

the aspirations to do well at school and to aim for advanced education, the sense that one’s own actions can change one’s life, and the giving of value to schooling and school results, referred to as aspirations, locus of control and valuing school.

You can read another summary of the research at “Education and Ambition” over at the Freakonomics blog.

I’ve posted some specific ideas on what we can do with parents to help them reinforce those kind of “aspirations” at The Best Ideas On How Parents Can Help Their Kids Succeed Academically.

One example of those troubles is their talking for three years about starting a parent academy.

The teachers union decided to take things in their own hands, though, and have just begun their own parent academy. Here’s an excerpt from an article today describing its first session:

…. with workshop titles such as “Parent as Leader,” and “Parent as Lobbyist,” the academy’s main purpose is to motivate parents to advocate on behalf of their children and schools, and demand education policy changes.

About fifty parents—ten from each borough—packed a third-floor conference room at union headquarters for the new academy’s inaugural meeting on Saturday morning….

The morning’s activities were designed to prompt parents to think about and articulate positive qualities of their schools, as well as issues to complain about, from teacher turnover to confusing test policies.

Some of the parents said they signed up for the five week long workshop series because they wanted to fell more included in school- and district-level policy discussions that currently feel out of reach. Others said they also wanted knowledge of how to empower their children to do the same.

The site includes a couple of short videos with her, too. You can read their transcripts here.

#PTchat 5-9-12 – “Parents Ask Mock Interview Questions of New & Experienced Teachers”

Exciting news! This Wednesday, May 9th at *8PM EST, #PTchat will team up with #NTchat (New Teacher Chat) during the one hour chat. Some of our parent participants have already submitted questions they’d like to pose to new and experienced teachers – some having to do with family engagement and some designed to share the perspective from home on what they look for in teachers for their children.

If you are a parent and are interested in submitting a questions to be asked on the chat, please email Joe here. If you are an educator, we invite you to take part in articulating your answers to these questions Wednesday night. Join us for this lively weekly discussion!

**Special Time 8PM EST/5PM PST

Past #PTchats have been archived on Joe Mazza’s eFACE Today blog.Past #NTchats are archived here.

You can read a full summary at Survey finds parent-teacher relationships strong–Teachers given grade of “A.”

Here’s how it begins:

Parenting magazine and the National Education Association today announced the results of a groundbreaking joint survey* of 1,000 public school parents and educators that explored the roadblocks to effective parent-teacher communication. When parents were asked to “grade” their relationship with their child’s teachers, nearly half (45 percent) gave the teachers an “A,” with the majority on both sides categorizing the relationship as “great” and “open.”

Despite the strong relationships, the survey revealed that the two sides differ on some key issues. Sixty-eight percent of teachers reported difficulty in dealing with parents. A similar percentage of parents–63 percent–reported they’d never had difficulty with teachers. More than one-quarter of parents stated their biggest challenge has been teachers’ perceived lack of understanding for their concerns, while one in three teachers cited parents’ lack of understanding of their child’s issues as their biggest challenge.

Parents believe they are more involved in their children’s education than their own parents were – and that children now have more opportunities in school, suggests a survey.

The survey for the National Association of Head Teachers looked at how parents viewed their children’s schooling.

Almost three quarters believed they were more engaged with their children’s school than the previous generation.

Head teachers’ leader Russell Hobby said the results were “heartening”.

Mr Hobby said the poll of over 1,000 parents in England, Wales and Northern Ireland suggested the schools were “welcoming places”.

You can order it here.

Here’s how they describe it:

Through the voices of parents, this film chronicles fifteen years of effective parent organizing for education reform in New York City – organizing that has stopped budget cuts, increased school funding, and led to the adoption of a citywide lead teacher program. The goal of Parent Power is to provide an example of successful education organizing to urban-based community groups looking for organizational inspiration and practical guidance in their own efforts to support, demand, and sustain equitable reforms in their own public schools. A Viewer’s Guide, designed to enhance community groups’ use of the film in their own education organizing efforts, accompanies the film. One free copy is available for an individual or organization Please note: All orders wil be charged $10 shipping and handling.

In addition to watching it online for free (it’s embedded below), you can download the viewers guide for free, too.