A topic in language education that I want to know more about
I would like to know more about the home-school connection; how parents are involved in what their children are doing, and if it makes any change in the students' performance at school.
I would like to know more about this topic, because as I've been observing the classes and the kids at the school, I wonder how the immigrant parents relate with the teacher and the school if they don't know much about the language. I would also like to know how the teacher manages to communicate with parents from so many different countries.
I've search on the Internet and I found some web sites that helped me to get a better understanding of this topic.
These links explain the importance that the home-school communication has in the child success. It is important that both, parents and teachers work together helping each other; because on the one hand, the teacher knows about the school, the curriculum, the grades and the child behaviour during school time. On the other hand, the parents know about the personality of the children, their interests and family relationship. The most common ways of communication between teachers and parents are by phone or e-mail.
Parent expectations are also important. Involving parents in the educational process benefits the children. It leads to a better communication, because parents know how they children are performing at school, if they are having any problems or difficulties. So students give more value to their education, they feel their parents care about it, they have a higher self-steem and fewer bahaviour problems.
A good idea is giving the children interactive homework to do with their parents, not too difficult (TIPS, Teachers Involving Parents in School). For instance, they can ask about family stories, recipes or family trees. But it is important to explain to the parents know what are you doing and why, before give them instructions and enough time.
I also talked with Mrs. R, the ESL teacher. She told me that it was very difficult to communicate with the parents of the children, for many reasons: many of them don't speak English, so when they need to communicate they need the help of a translatior, sometimes the cultures are different, and parents are not expected to be involved in the children education at school, many times they don't have time to go to school because they have to work or they don't feel comfortable involving in activities with American parents. So it is a big challenge, but Mrs. Ross is very respectful of this, she tries to involve parents but she doesn't force them.
1 comments:
Wow, Pauli, there are some great links here. I'll keep your posting so that I can refer to them later. You do a fantastic job explaining your reasoning here.
Gina
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