Reading: Home-school partnerships.
What are they really?
Keren Brooking
This reading is about the importance of home and school
partnerships in a child’s learning journey.
A home-school partnership refers to proposals and concepts
that schools can introduce that involve whānau in a child’s learning. There is emphasis placed on schools making an
effort to strengthen communication and interaction with family and caregivers
because there is clear evidence that this can have positive effects for
children’s education – refer to research done by Epstein (1992, 2006),
Desforges and Abouchaar (2003) and Biddulph, Biddulph and Biddulph – “Best
Evidence Synthesis” (2003).
The article encourages teachers to have a switch in their
thinking so that they don’t make partnerships a one-way street where they are
telling the parents what the child needs to learn and what the parents should
be doing at home. Instead, look at
working with the parents/whānau to gain a greater knowledge of learning in the
home and connecting the two together so that there are opportunities for
children to achieve at a higher success rate, have higher engagement and
improve attendance. Alongside this, in
regards to the children’s learning, their interests, enthusiasm and attitudes
are a focus and research suggests that there can be improvement if there is a
successful home-school partnership.
Some important factors to consider are that home life is
extremely complex and is constantly changing and the need for regular meetings will
help in this area. Also, that time is
major factor and needs to be considered by the school and the home with
encouragement of commitment from both parties.
School hours usually clash with work hours for parents and vice
versa. What is important for an
affective partnership is that both home and school place significant value in what they are doing and
recognise the issue is worth solving – in this case, a child’s education. Home-school partnerships also need to time to
become initially established and strengthened.
What I learnt from this article is that teachers need to
make an effort to form these home-school partnerships. There seems to be a need for a shift in
teacher thinking where they try not to dictate what they want the child to
learn to the parents but instead, ask the parents about learning in their home
and form a plan that suits individual’s educational needs. It also made me reflect on why some parents
may be a little hesitant to form this type of partnership – could some parents
feel like they aren’t educated enough to teach their children because of their
own schooling and just rely on the schools to provide this for their
children? Or there maybe families who
don’t place value in education and therefore do not care? I will be aware of this when looking at
home-school partnerships in the future.
