One area of family involvement that I find crucially important is the communication aspect. Communication from school to home can happen through many different mediums. One way for parents to be in communication with families is through a weekly or bi-weekly newsletter, especially in a middle school setting through a "Team Newsletter". This can be sent home via mail, but it could also be sent home with the student, thus empowering the student to deliver news about their school life to their parents. Healthy communication could also be practiced with a follow-up email, to ensure the parents receiving the information about the school, or team. Communication with families also may consist of parent-teacher conferences, which can happen once or twice a year for each student, with follow ups as needed. Communication from school to home allows the student to feel a connection between the two important places of their life and parents can enhance their growth if they are aware of what they are doing in the classroom and at school on a regular basis.
Another area of family involvement that I find important for student growth is collaboration with the community. This can been seen in many different forms, but two way that stick out to me is bringing in family members to help further a content area or assist students students with a possible language barrier between teacher and student. When I was in school, my dad came in to a few of my classes to help further our study of forestry because of his knowledge on the subject. We would go on nature walks throughout the woods with my classes with our teacher and fellow students, with my father leading the way explaining the different types of trees. This is just one personal example, but I feel like this type of family involvement allows for the content to be practical for students and it never hurts for content information to come from another perspective than the teacher that the students listen to on a daily basis. Parents of students share all sorts of knowledge and experience, and its only beneficial for students if teachers and schools allow for opportunities for those parents to come in an find ways to connect content being discussed in the classroom to their real world experiences. Another type of family involvement that is successful through community collaboration is the use of translators for ELL students. Through some classroom observations at Winooski High School, I noticed this type of family or community involvement to be extremely useful for their ELL students. Having translators come in from the community to assist students really allows for students to feel welcomed and have a greater chance of truly excelling in the course. ELL students are just as a capable and English speaking students, but through translators, it really helps them learn the content successfully in a classroom setting
Christian, you have great insight into specific ways to incorporate family and community involvement in the classroom! It is so important to bring the theory into reality. Even as a pre-educator, your ability to think of specific methods to involve the community and families is impressive! I got a lot out of reading your blog post! In fact, your point about printing the weekly newsletter for some students is something that I hadn't considered before. All of my students' parents have email addresses, so I made (the naive) assumption that they all had the internet. It is more likely that some do not and they needed an email for some other purpose (employment or credit card application or something similar). I will be using this little tid bit starting this week in my classroom and asking if any families would prefer a printed copy of my weekly communications! Thank you for your deep insights and I'm glad to have you as a classmate/"colleague". :)
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