Home-School Partnerships, Essay Example

The below paper is designed to review the benefits of creating an effective home-school partnership in order to advance children’s early education.

Desforges and Abouchaar (2003, p. 17) has already confirmed that parental involvement has a positive impact on overall pupil achievement. However, the strategies to implement partnership, collaboration and communication are not clearly outlined. The authors would like to introduce three strategies to develop and strengthen links between the school and home.

Building a Community. In order to increase parental involvement, I would like to create a support group of parents who would help educators develop plans for helping children who are left behind or need extra attention. This would include reading with children, selecting adequate books to share and joining local visits.

Exploring Shared Vision. In order to increase parental involvement in school work and education, there is a need for finding a common ground. Parent surveys would be distributed in order to gain an understanding of mothers’ and fathers’ preferences and priorities. The results wold be shared with participants and a parent-school agreement would be drawn up based on common visions. Peer groups would be also created to focus on different child, family background characteristics and individual needs of different groups. (Desforges and Abouchaar 2003, p. 24)

Parent Involvement in Leadership. One of the most challenging aspects of improving parental involvement is communication. Therefore, parents would be recruited who would take on a leading role in creating newsletters, discussing issues, administering surveys, questionnaires and developing plans based on suggestions created after class observation. Leaders of the parental committee would be invited to meetings and sit through classes to gain a better understanding of the structure of education in the school.

References

Desforges, C., Abouchaar, A. (2003) The impact of parental involvement, parental support and family education on pupil achievement and adjustment: A literature review. Queen’s Printer 2003