parent teacher partnerships Archives

6 Amazing Parent Engagement Ideas in Early Education

Feb 28, 2023 | Early Literacy, Holistic Learning, Parental Involvement

Effective parent engagement is a crucial component of early childhood education. It’s one way to ensure parental involvement in the classroom, which Sprig identified as one of the 15 essential terms in early childhood educational equity.

When parents are involved in their child’s education, they can help create a supportive learning environment that promotes academic success and social-emotional development.

However, finding ways to engage parents in their child’s education can be challenging, especially in a world where parents are busier than ever.

Sprig Learning presents these 6 effective parent engagement ideas that can help schools and teachers build strong partnerships with parents, support their child’s learning, and ultimately improve outcomes in early education.

1. Adequate Positive Reinforcement

Adequate Positive Reinforcement

Many parents only hear from their school when there’s a problem or concern with their child. By changing the conversation and sending home positive feedback early in the school year, parents are more enthused to be involved in their child’s education. They can see that engaging with their child’s school doesn’t always mean a trip to the principal’s office.

A quick email, note, or message that recognizes a student’s progress, achievement, or positive behavior can make a big difference in building a strong partnership with parents and caregivers.

Positive reinforcement isn’t just for your students – it’s a powerful tool for engaging and motivating parents too.

2. Culturally Responsive Communications

Culturally Responsive Communications

Effective parent engagement requires sensitivity and respect for the cultural backgrounds of diverse students and families.

To create a supportive and inclusive learning environment, it’s important to plan events and activities that are culturally relevant and respectful, and to communicate with families in a way that values their perspectives and experiences as the first teachers of their children.

When engaging with parents, it’s important to actively listen and respond to their needs, concerns, and feedback. By building a relationship of trust and respect, parents feel heard, supported, and understood. It strengthens the partnership between home and school.

As classrooms become more diverse, it’s essential to prioritize cultural responsiveness and engagement to help all students thrive.

3. Setting a Parent-Teacher Collaborative Culture

Setting a Parent-Teacher Collaborative Culture

Collaboration between parents and teachers is critical to supporting children’s learning and development. To foster a strong and healthy parent-teacher relationship, it’s important to establish a sense of mutual support and encourage parents to take an active role in their child’s education.

It’s so important in fact, that Sprig listed partnering with parents as one of the four golden rules of early literacy development.

By including parents in classroom activities, inviting them to share their experiences, and providing regular updates on their child’s progress, parents feel valued and engaged in their child’s learning journey. When they feel welcome and appreciated in the classroom, they are more likely to be enthusiastic partners and advocates for their child’s education.

Emphasizing the importance of parent-teacher collaboration can have a significant impact on student success and create a more positive and supportive school culture.

4. Embracing Technology for Two-way Conversations

Embracing Technology for Two-way Conversations

Technology has transformed the way parents and caregivers stay connected to their child’s education. To effectively engage with parents, it’s important to leverage the power of digital communication and provide multiple ways for parents to stay informed and involved.

Whether through email, text message, social media, or educational apps and software, teachers can communicate more easily and frequently with parents, sharing updates on student progress, upcoming events, and classroom news.

By meeting parents where they are and using the communication channels they prefer, teachers can create a more convenient and responsive experience for families, and foster a stronger sense of partnership and engagement.

Embracing technology as a tool for parent engagement can help bridge the gap between home and school, and ultimately lead to better outcomes for students.

5. Provide Parents with the Tools They need to Reinforce Learning in the Home.

Provide Parents with the Tools They need to Reinforce Learning in the Home.

Meaningful parent engagement involves empowering parents with the tools and resources they need to support their child’s learning journey at home.

By providing parents with guidance, understanding, and fun learning activities for home, teachers can create opportunities for parents to reinforce learning beyond the classroom. This can take many forms, such as providing digital tools like Sprig Library or sending home printouts and activity sheets in a backpack.

The more parents are equipped with the tools and resources they need to support their child’s learning, the more invested they will be in their child’s education.

By fostering a collaborative and supportive relationship with parents, teachers can help families feel more connected to their child’s school experience.

6. Provide Opportunities for Fun Engagement

Provide Opportunities for Fun Engagement

When it comes to parental engagement, the simplest approach is often the most effective. Encouraging fun, creativity, and open-mindedness can help parents and families feel more invested in their child’s education and more connected to the school community.

By providing opportunities for parents to come together and have fun, such as in summer learning programs for example, teachers can create a sense of camaraderie and build a positive and supportive school culture.

The key is to establish an open and relaxed pathway for communication between the school and home. This can include regular check-ins, parent-teacher conferences, newsletters, and other forms of outreach that keep parents informed and engaged.

By creating a culture of collaboration and openness, teachers can foster strong relationships with families and help create a more successful learning experience for students.

The Winning Recipe for Parent Engagement in Early Education

In conclusion, engaging parents in the early years creates a successful and positive learning environment for young children. By using simple yet effective strategies such as positive reinforcement, cultural sensitivity, technology tools, collaboration, and fun, teachers can encourage parents to take an active role in their child’s education.

Providing parents with the tools they need to support learning in the home and establishing open and relaxed channels of communication can help build strong relationships between the home and school.

By working together, parents and teachers can create a more meaningful and impactful educational experience for children in their early years.

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Defining Parent Engagement in 2019

Dec 28, 2018 | Parental Involvement

Elise Twyford

Teacher

Elise Twyford is an early-years educator and lifelong learner. She is currently running the Sprig Learning Oral Language Learning Program in her classroom in Toronto, Ontario.

What does parent engagement look like in 2019?

Parents spend countless hours caring for their child — they are the experts on the little person that you meet in your classroom. They send their hopes and dreams into school with their child, and every parent wants to see their child succeed. As educators, we get the privilege to spend a few hours a day helping their little learners build the skills they need along their path toward academic success.

But while we know that relational trust between schools and parents is linked to higher levels of student achievement, how much time are we as educators dedicating to actively nurturing our relationships with parents and caregivers? How can we create a welcoming and responsive classroom culture, one where engagement is initiated and led by parents, caregivers and community members? And what does parent engagement look like in the culturally responsive classroom, particularly in communities where trust in the education system is lacking, oftentimes because of historical trauma?

**What does it even mean to engage parents in early learning?**

We tend to evaluate parent engagement by the number of parents who attend parent-teacher interviews, or how regularly we communicate directly with the home. These numbers, although important, are often more representative of a parents’ busy schedule than their meaningful engagement with their child’s education.

Because we lack the framework and tools we need to discuss and describe parental engagement, we as teachers often find ourselves unable to analyze and assess the true fruits of our efforts. We know that we are doing “something” to get parents engaged in our classrooms—but is it enough?

Ken Leithwood argues that we need to shift away from the current model of trying to get parents into the school, and towards a model where parents and caregivers can support learning in the home. After all, this is where half of the learning that we are responsible for as educators happens.

The Ladder of Participation

Roger Hart (1992) developed the Ladder of Youth Participation to describe levels of youth engagement. At the bottom of the ladder, you can see an engagement model that is providing information. At the top of the ladder, you see a model that has ideas initiated by youth and both adults and youth sharing in the decision making.

Could this same framework be used to think about how teachers engage parents in classrooms?

https://healthyschoolsbc.ca/healthy-schools-bc-resources/healthy-schools-network/

Typically, when we think of parent engagement, we think of the communication that happens through emails and calls to the home. We think of parent representatives on school committees, parent volunteers in school-wide activities, and parent-teacher night. The common thread here is that engagement happens on the school’s terms rather than the parent’s. From Hart’s ladder, this would look like the bottom 1-5 rungs (if we were being generous).

But what if we imagined a more engaging approach, one that supports parents to direct, define and lead the engagement?

This is especially true when looking at the culturally responsive classroom of 2019. For example, in speaking to culturally restorative practices at the First Nations School of Toronto (Parent Discussion Night, January 23, 2018), Estelle Simard described engaging Elders, parents, and community members in how culture should be taught in school, and the importance of creating meaningful engagement that enabled families to both initiate and define how they engage with their child’s school.

Estelle provided an example of a community where the Elders wanted regalia making, the creation of traditional and sometimes sacred clothing and accessories, to be a component of the school’s curriculum. The school then aligned curriculum and opened the door for the community to share their knowledge on the subject, creating a community of sharing and mutual respect.

Building Bridges between the Home and the School

We work hard to build relationships with our students. In order to increase parent engagement, we need to further that hard work by building relationships with parents, caregivers, and the community. So how can we honour this in our own classrooms and begin building bridges between home and school?

– Attend community events – and don’t be shy about engaging with parents. Even a small wave or nod will start you on the path to building trust and a positive relationship with parents.
– Create a classroom culture that encourages constant dialogue between yourself and your students’ caregivers, and work together to determine how to best support their child. Remember, the dialogue must be reciprocal. At the end of the day, parents are the true experts when it comes to their child.
– Most importantly — listen.

One of the benefits of working with the Sprig Learning Platform has been that it provides me with the opportunity to connect my classroom to every one of my students’ home lives, and to provide parents and caregivers with the tools they need to reinforce learning in their own homes.

We started out with a classroom birthday party for a haptic-enabled moose puppet named Antle, who is the star of Sprig’s Learning and MK Education’s Oral Language Learning Program. We invited parents, grandparents, and caregivers into our classroom, and encouraged them to learn more about the literacy learning that happens every day at school.

We interviewed each caregiver on the iOS-based caregiver survey, and parents and caregivers gave us more information about the literacy learning that happens at home and in the community. We all had such a great time at the party, and the small interactions that took place really built trust and strengthened our relationships with the families. Even better, we established a two-way dialogue between the home and school, both in-person and through the Sprig Learning online platform. Our students’ parents can now see activities that we recommend to further learning in the home, and trust that we are both working together to lead their little learner down a path to success.

Parent-Teacher Partnerships Lead to Success

The lasting effect of parents and teachers working together is clear when we see these students grow into healthy, confident, and curious lifelong learners. It’s important to find the approaches and strategies that work best for your classroom, but always remember to listen, be open-minded, and to have fun.

This guest post on the Sprig Learning Blog was contributed by Elise Twyford, a teacher and lifelong learner based out of Toronto, Ontario. You can follow Elise here.

For more information about a holistic approach to assessment or holistic education, book a demo today or send us an email at letstalk@spriglearning.com.