Family Partnerships examines the importance of parent involvement in a student’s academic career. The article starts with posing the question “Which of these endeavors to "involve parents" contribute to student learning?” Most schools have a large list of involvement opportunities for families, however, when putting these activities into categories of building relationships, supporting learning, and neither the result changes. Many involvement opportunities for families do not improve student achievement. In order to improve student achievement educators and schools must build respectful relationships. To establish this relationship, educators must find a common ground (family funds of knowledge) and bringing it into the classroom. Additionally, teacher-parent partnerships for learning are crucial for students’ achievement. In order to engage families in supporting learning at home, a suggestion made by the article was a school-home reading journal.
Why Some Parents Don’t Come to School article starts by stating the institute’s perspective on the parents’ lack of involvement. The institutes often assume that students who do not succeed academically have parents that do not get involved in school. The article follows this by stating the voices of “those parents” that do not get involved. The shared that it is often the context of their lives that creates tension between home and the school. This often is apart of their person experiences with the school. The other two major contributes to the “lack of involvement” is time and economic constraints. The suggestions for educators provided include clarifying exactly how the parents can assist, develop trust, build on home experiences, and use parent experts as resources in the classroom. All of these suggestions will allow the parents more of an opportunity to get involved in the classroom/school and will contribute to academic achievement (which relates to the Family Partnerships article).
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After reading both articles (that examined parent involvement), I was able to relate it to my experience at the school in Costa Rica. Since the school is a private school and parents must work hard so that their children can attend this school, I feel as though parent involvement is a much smaller “problem” then it is in public schools (both in the United States and in Costa Rica).
Throughout my level one and two internship, I have a seen a “lack of parent involvement” with an ELL student. The parents of this student did not reply to teacher email/notes/calls, or attend parent teacher night, etc. Later, while interviewing the student for an ESOL assignment, it was revealed that the student’s parents have a time constraint (discussed in Why Some Parents Don’t Come to School). A home visit took place, and after this, the parents were slightly more involved in the student’s academic career. I think that if the suggestions stated in the articles were implemented, then the parents would have been more involved in the students schooling earlier in the year rather then towards the end of the year.