CAROLYN
BEITZEL
Diary #8
Calling
All Parents
We make a mistake when we fail to involve middle school parents in their children's learning, as hard as it can be to do.
There is not much that does not get noticed by a parent of an elementary school child. The expectations of parents in elementary school are fairly straightforward and standardized: daily work is sent home, failed tests and detention notices are acknowledged by a parent's signature. Notes are passed back and forth from teacher to child to parent to child to teacher.
Then the same child advances to middle school. Instead of daily folders, there is a weekly one, full of notices and administrative paperwork, but rarely is classwork sent home for the parent's perusal, unless a failure notice is attached to it. Phone calls are only made when a child exhibits some type of misbehavior; coming late to school, discipline, fighting, etc.
Once that same child moves on to high school then it is pretty much their responsibility to keep up and the parent is left in the dark. Out With The Old In many schools, parents remain a largely untapped resource.I had this conversation with a seasoned teacher the other day. We were discussing the lack of classroom assistants in regular ed classrooms. Our low level classes tend to have at least eight or more students who have learning disabilities but are included in regular education classes.
I asked: "Why don't we have more parents helping us out in our classrooms?" The response: "Are you kidding? Parents will only interfere with us and won't let us do our jobs." And later on: "Children will listen better if there parents are not in the same room."
Many schools allow parents to volunteer in the lunchroom or on class trips, but most are reluctant to have them participate directly in their child's class for fear of the disruptions it may cause.When I was a nurse and there was a patient in the emergency room who needed urgent care, the first thing the physicians did was ask the family members to leave. I could never quite understand their rationale. When I asked, I received the same type of response I got when talking about parents in the classroom. "They will get in the way." "It is too hard doing my job having someone looking over my shoulder." "I'm trying to save their life and don't need to be worrying about relatives." When really, what they did not want to say is "What if I make a mistake? They will know I made it."
I think that is exactly what the seasoned teacher was saying to me. "What if I have to explain myself and defend my teaching values to them?" In With The New In my classroom, parents are welcome. At Back to School Night we made it clear that parents and guardians could come in whenever they wanted. They could just sit and listen or (what I would really like) they could help me out. Our team made initial phone calls to every parent within the first six weeks of school to let them know how their child was doing. We are creating a Team Newsletter that will go to every parent on a monthly basis. Our philosophy is we want every parent to feel welcome in our classrooms at any time of the day. We could use their expertise as examples to the students to show them that success and citizenship are part of the lives of many ordinary people.The really interesting thing is not one parent has taken advantage of our offer.
It really doesn't make sense to me that we, as parents, spend the first five years getting to know the personalities of our children, their strengths and weaknesses; pouring into that child everything we feel to be important, right and good, only to drop them off at the door of the neighborhood school shouting "see ya" and let the professionals take it from there.
Clearly, we will have to up the ante if we're going to get parents involved. I am planning an Internet activity in the next few weeks and will "invite" a parent to come assist me in the computer lab. The science teacher is going to ask parents to come in and help her on lab days. The language arts teacher is planning a mini play and will ask parents to help out with that activity as well. Now, we just have to get some folks into the math room. Any ideas?
[Editor's note: See MiddleWeb's parent involvement resources page!]
