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Involving families in learning

(Information here is drawn from the Philippines Multigrade Teacher's Handbook.)

Children learn better when their parents and other family members are interested in, and involved with, the school and with education.

When we involve families in learning, we enhance the potential for learning in our classrooms, and we create support for our teaching in many ways.

Making contact

There are several effective ways to initiate communication with the families of children in your class. Begin by trying the method that appeals to you most, but be sure to try other methods on later occasions.

To create effective contact and co-operation:

Invite families to a group meeting.
Group meetings are great ways to make your first contact, and to sustain contact two or three times during the year. In the first meeting, introduce yourself, and describe the general learning goals for the year. Show families the classroom, and describe the specific ways that they can help by volunteering time and energy.

Use later meetings to foster families' involvement in specific projects, such as field visits, school gardens, living-history collections of family stories, and so on. You can also describe special projects that the class has completed or has coming up, and invite families to "presentation days" for plays and oral presentations.

Be sure to keep meetings brief, and focused. You should be able to accomplish everything you need to do in an hour or less.


Schedule parent-teacher conferences.
Once or twice a year, if possible, schedule ten or twenty-minute individual meetings with the parents of children in your class. Use these meetings to present work that you've collected in portfolios, to draw attention to a child's talents and achievements, and to outline learning obstacles or areas that need special focus.

Conferences should not be seen in a negative light. They should be considered normal parts of the school experience, and valuable opportunities for families and teachers to share their insights and concerns.

If you schedule conferences throughout the year, eight conferences per month will enable you to meet with families of 40 students in five months, or roughly half a school year. Alternatively, you can hold shorter meetings with all parents in two- or three-week concentrated periods.

For more information about collecting samples of children's work in portfolios, go to Active assessment for active teaching and Assessment: Learner work samples.


Send learners' work home.
When children finish a project, such as writing a story or a report, or diagramming geometric figures, you can elect to send the work home with them (instead of posting it in the classroom or adding it to portfolios).

Guide learners in tapping the knowledge in their homes.
If appropriate, impress upon family members that reading to young children at home is one of the surest ways to enhance their learning in school. You may also wish to explain that writing is an important activity also, and that it is beneficial for children to practice it, even if they form letters or spell incorrectly while they are learning.

Family members can also offer a wealth of stories and information that can connect to learning in the classroom.

In language arts and social studies, invite children to interview parents or grandparents about their own childhood years (including games, stories, historic events, and so on), and to render these as stories or essays.

Invite family members to act as aides in the classroom.
When family members have both the time and the interest, they can be valuable assistants in the classroom and on field visits.

In addition, they will have a chance to understand both the challenges that you face as a teacher, and the good work you do to overcome those challenges.

It is critical that you outline specific duties for family volunteers. These can include:

    - reading a story to a small group
    - playing an active-learning game with a small group
    - preparing learning materials
    - helping learners work on projects
    - assisting on field trips

Learning materials that adult volunteers can create include math manipulatives (or concrete materials in mathematics), "big books" for reading, and science displays. They can assist children with all kinds of projects, including those in which the adults have special skills, such as woodworking or working with fabric.


Journal activity: Mapping involvement

Create a plan to engage families in the education of their children.

(If you completed the journal activity, "Assessing things as they are," in Teachers and communities, you may want to review the results.)

Begin by summarising the current relations that you have to the family members of children in your class. How do you communicate with them? How are they involved in their children's learning?

At the top of a separate page of your journal, write two to four ways in which you would like to engage families, such as "Holding a group meeting," "Encouraging reading at home," and "Organising volunteers for field visits," and "Organising volunteers in class."

In columns under each objective, note down:

    - what materials you need to prepare (if any)
    - the means you'll use to communicate with families
    - an approximate date for initiating the program
    - other relevant dates

Note the connections between different events. If you have a group meeting early in the year, you can use that to solicit classroom volunteers and to discuss the value of reading to children at home.

Mark the starting dates and other relevant dates on your calendar or in your date book. In this way, you've created a simple "family-involvement plan."


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Last revised April, 1999
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