Schools continuously work hard to do the best for children, employing the latest teaching methods and resources. They constantly look for ways to build children’s academic, emotional, and social skills and prepare them for the real world. However, these efforts are not displayed promptly to the parents.
Parents, on the other hand, often feel left out about their child’s learning and growth. They are continually looking for ways to stay in touch with their child’s school, classroom, and teachers, but don’t know how to approach the situation.
An ideal scenario would be one where all the hard work and efforts by the teachers and school for the best development of the child are showcased to the parent, making the parents feel emotionally satisfied and delighted.
This is why schools need to work to make learning visible to parents. Here are a few ways to do that.
Encourage Parent Volunteering
By putting forth specific ways for parents to help in the classrooms or school in general, schools can easily involve parents in the learning environment. Schools can invite parents to be part of group discussions, story-telling sessions, present your profession sessions, to volunteer for field trips or school events. Schools can be as creative as they want to create opportunities for parents to be involved in their child’s learning process, as well as the academic culture of the school.
Use Technology-Based Engagement Platforms
A healthy parent-school communication ensures that parents are kept up to date with relevant, accurate information regarding the school and their child’s academic performance. Parents often do not get time from their busy lifestyle to get involved in their child’s school lives, and they often miss out on the ‘wow’ moments of learning from within the classroom. An easy-to-use Parent Engagement Platform (PEP) can be used to solve all these problems. With visual posts about their child’s activities in the classroom, fee payments and upcoming school events, parents can stay up to date about the everyday learning of their child. This is perhaps the most effective way of making learning visible.
Instead of relying on the vague answer to the question ‘What did you learn in school today?’, parents will be in sync with all the activities of their little ones, taking the parent-child discussion at home to the next level, ultimately enabling parents to support their child better.
Student Lead Conferences
As the name suggests, these are parent conferences lead by the students instead of the teachers or the school. Students invite their parents to the school and right from receiving them at the school gate, the students take their parents on a tour of the school, across all places of learning for the child: the labs, play area, and of course the classroom. On this tour, students showcase and demonstrate their learnings to their own parents, enhancing the student-parent-teacher-school relationship.
Maintain a school blog
Blogging is one of the best ways for keeping parents in the loop about the happenings in the school. Using it to post general school updates such as volunteering opportunities and events would ensure the active involvement of parents. And after all, blogs are easy to set up, great in establishing trust among parents, and can lead to a sense of community.
Embrace Social Media
Social media is a helpful yet underused way to encourage healthy communication with parents. A facebook group, in particular, is one of the most popular ways to make learning visible to parents but you can also experiment with Twitter or even Instagram to understand which platforms parents are more comfortable with. The only shortcoming of this method is that it is not as personalised as mobile platforms can be.
With the methods mentioned above, school leaders can create a robust system of making learning visible for their schools. And thereby fulfilling the goals of enhancing parental delight and trust for the school.
