Where Do Parents Plug In?

I'd like to thank @plind for this guest post. She was kind enough to respond to my Plugged In Parents Post. In my enthusiasm for both technology integration and the power of effective formative assessment, I had not given thought to the following perspective. I hope that this post encourages some debate from educators and parents alike:

By: @plind (I follow her on Twitter)

I have been mulling over the $64,000 question "Do parents want this level of involvement in their child's education?" in my mind for quite awhile now and I'd like to up the ante and ask the million dollar question of "Should parents be that involved in their child's education?"

My answer is no on both counts. I don't want to be at the "edge of my child's learning" (nor do I think I should be) -- I want to be at the fringe. I want to be close enough to cheer them on or rush the field if they are injured but far enough removed that I don't interfere with the game. I want my child to own their learning, own their successes and own their failures. They can't do that without some distance from me. The ongoing debate is -- how much distance is too much or too little?

I'm certainly not opposed to more meaningful assessments of my child's learning. Honestly the "letters" change every year on report cards -- who can keep up! I put more stock on the one paragraph written by the teacher than the alphabet soup that precedes it. However, frequently receiving 140 character updates to my phone or computer would likely drive me mad. Several different teachers using this approach with my 3 children would become overwhelming fast. Expectations would have to be clear as well. When I receive a message that my child is struggling with multiplication what does that mean? Am I to intervene? Is the teacher forming a plan to address the problem? Is the whole class struggling? Feedback without context or direction only creates anxiety and uncertainty.

When we talk about engaging parents in children's learning I think it's important to remember that there is a difference between engaging with my child to learn together and engaging with my child's schoolwork. I want to be engaged with my children and as school is a large portion of their lives of course it is an important component but not the only component. I appreciate the window into their lives that blogs, newsletters, and websites provide. I value the ambient awareness that allows me to ask better questions at the dinner table, point out signs of lifecycles on a walk or reminds me to delve into fractions while baking. However, I also have my own knowledge, passions, interests and heritage that I would like to share with my children. Over-involving me in their formal education slowly erodes my ability to engage in those moments and those moments are both precious and fleeting.

As new technologies emerge that allow us to be embedded deeper and deeper in our children's lives we all have the responsibility to ask if that is really what is best. From GPS enabled phones that track every movement, webcam enabled classrooms that we can peek into, instant, continuous feedback, and digital records of schoolwork that can be freely accessed -- when and where do children have the space to become independent? We have to be cautious as we engage with these tools and ensure that there are measures in place that allow children to become progressively more responsible for themselves and allows (even forces?) parents to step back. While the notion of involving parents more meaningfully in their child's education is a sound one, we need to do so judiciously to ensure that there is still time left in a day for parents to engage with their children around all aspects of their being, not just school.

The infinite possibilities for communication and engagement are mindboggling. However, just because we can, doesn't mean we should.


Your thoughts are solicited...

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Plugged In Parents

How do you involve parents in the formative assessment cycle. Caren Cameron says that different types of assessment have different purposes. She goes on to say that the purpose of formative assessment is to inform the student and the teacher where to go next with the learning. David Bolton calls this being on the edge of the student learning (I like that). Cameron continues to explain that summative assessment has the purpose of reporting out.

Well over the past few days I have been having micro-conversations with my twitter network about just this concept. Without fail, educators will agree that the formative assessment is where they want to spend all their time. It is relevant to the day to day learning of their students. It guides their teaching and learning. A mass of descriptive feedback occurs and students push themselves along the continuum of understanding. Where as, summative assessment is the anchor that holds new learning back. It is labourious for teachers and admin alike, it is a mere formalization of conversations that have hopefully already happened with parents. Most often it is a pseudo objective process. More realistically, it is a subjective process where behaviour and work habits too often creep in and influence what should be an evaluation of understanding and ability to apply.

Almost all educators will say that the real assessment is happening on the front lines.

How do we get parents into this cycle of feedback?

I think this is where technology can play a major role. It is true that there are many parents who are not tech savvy. There are many who are. There are too many educators who are not tech savvy. These are excuses not real barriers. It is not going to be long before the masses are using applications like twitter to micro-blog updates on everything from coffee requests to professional development questions.

I don't think that there is a silver bullet solution here. What I think is that we, as educators, need to layer the tech network/info/feedback opportunities for parents, teachers and students. Like any good differentiated classroom the educator needs to accommodate for all levels of readiness. Here are some ideas for you to look at and provide feedback.

Layers that currently seem pretty common in many schools today include school and classroom websites. Many including a calendar of events, static information like teacher lists (some with emails), school goals, mission statements and registration information. These pages also contain less static info like school newsletters, pdf versions of notices, homework worksheets and the like. These webpages are quite informative and a great place to start. They can be quite laborious for the webmaster (most often a teacher who already has lots to do). Unfortunately, many of these web pages end up outdated with dead links or dated information.

For most parents the most useful web page is a homework page that is updated daily. This page allows parents, at work for example, to check the page before they head home and then initiate a better conversation than "what did you do at school today?". The conversation changes to "how can help you with your public speech that is due in two days?". These tools depend on the parent to regularly check a webpage. Making these pages rss-able can help reduce this dependence. The next step could be a listserve for all the parents of children in the class. Personal emails to particular parents are more direct to parental routines. Many parents now check email as part of their daily routine. Teachers can take advantage of this communication tool. However, this takes a long time for teachers and sometimes emails lack the tone the teacher intended and it can sometimes lead to miscommunication that cause a mess that would need to be cleaned up. In addition, emails mostly deal with behaviour and tasks rather than descriptive feedback that help move students/parents along a continuum of understanding.

These layers are still utilitarian and while they help parents engage they still do not get parents onto the edge of their child's learning. The next level of parent engagement is archival apps that capture work and provide opportunities for a community of feedback. Class and/or student blogs that allow parents to be a part of the network that can comment on work bring parents into the feedback loop. Voicethread.com allows for work to be displayed and then for feedback to be layered in on various aspects of the work. Peers, teachers and parents can all provide descriptive feedback. Class wikis can show off group work and link aggregators like delicious.com allow students to collaborate and for parents to stay abreast of the various projects their students are working on.

The final layer I want to talk about puts the parent right on the edge of student learning. I don't see this being a reality in my current school system just yet. But I think that it has huge potential once all the bugs are worked out. Once teachers shift their pedagogy to a child centered classroom where open ended tasks are differentiated for the various groups of needs in the room and children have spent a good chunk of time at the beginning of the year learning how learning is going to function in the classroom, the teacher is able to get down and dirty with individual students for micro-conferences in which the teacher is able to push the student to the next level of thinking and also provide formative (highly descriptive) feedback on what the student needs to do next and where they are succeeding. Teacher could use micro-social networks like edmodo.com, ning.com, and/or buzzable.com to micro-blog (140 characters or less) a paraphrasing of the specific feedback (or as one of my staff suggested, use voice recognition software to simply speak the feedback into a micro-blog tool). Using hashtag (i.e. #jared) the micro-blog entries would be archived and easily sorted when it came time to write summative report cards. Parent conversations would totally change at home because both parent and student would have the feedback comment to initiate dialogue. Students could look back at the archived feedback so as to make adjustments to assignments once they looked at them again at home.

All of these tools can be found as free web 2.0 apps or they could be arranged under the convenient umbrella of a district/school or class portal. For more information on portals check out the excellent work of Cindy Seibel at http://portalguide.tech4learning.ca/

This idea could actually happen right now. Using one of the micro-blogging apps mentioned above and if parent, student and teacher had a web browser ready cell phone (i.e iPhone), we could involve parents in the formative assessment cycle live as it happens.

The 64000 dollar question is not whether we can do this or how do we make this a reality. The real question is do the majority of parents really want this level of involvement in their children's education?

I now solicit your thoughts and feedback.

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The Journey To Theory...

So many conversations with so many people. This needs to change. That should be like this. Everyone of the ideas I have read about, discussed or debated have been outstanding in their own right. How do we go from conversations to real time change?

Well if you look at versions of change theory, the first action is to create the need for change. Create an urgency if you will. Why would a school board, district staff want to make changes unless they saw a reason for that change. Why would a province, for that matter, look at curricular change if what they were doing seemed to be working. This is easy enough to do on a small scale (i.e. stop sending paper memos to staff and only provide critical information on email to help staff move to using email on a daily basis).

How do we initiate large scale change?

For practical reasons, let's start by looking at the public school calendar and schedule. In our province the majority of schools are open September - June with 2 weeks off for Christmas, a week off in the spring and 2 months off for summer. This schedule hearkens back to a society where agricultural needs took priority over urban needs. Children were needed to help with the harvest. Most schools schedules can trace their origins back to allowing children to do their farm chores in the morning before getting to school and then home in time to help with the farm chores after school.

This does not come anywhere near the current societal needs. Many families now have two working parents desperate for caregivers who can watch their children from 7am-6pm. The pressure on our school system and day care system is daunting. Can we find a way to partner all the current players that raise our children. The axiom that it takes a community to raise a child has never applied more than in today's context.

Public schools, parks and rec., musical theatre companies, sports organizations, art schools, private businesses, and trades organizations should all be working together to provide a smorgasbord of opportunities for our students. Not just at the high school level, but all the way down to early childhood education. In addition, we should be working with employers to encourage parental involvement in their child's learning and the parents should be learning along side their child. It would take a complete societal paradigm shift. "School" would no longer be the industrial revolution based institution that churns out a work force. It would become the experiences that teach children to be productive citizens.

The schedule of schooling would differentiate for each child. Parents would be able to expose their children to the entire matrix of opportunities. You would have to integrate teacher shifts, experts coming in to teach, field experiences. You would have to be an incredibly creative accountant. You would have to have the political will to prioritize the education of our children. Private/public partnerships would have to be entered into so that funding would not be a crippling barrier. School facilities would be used year round from early morning into the evening. It would all be integrated. The teachers would become facilitators of educational experiences. They would ensure that children were meeting a required set of opportunities. They would be charged with ongoing parent communication where descriptive feedback would be the norm. There would be no marks or structures of comparisons needed. Our "system" would get onto the edge of learning for each child. Parents would have to be more involved in their child's education. Employers would have to be prepared to incorporate their employees having to schedule their work day around being involved in their child's educational experiences.

Collaborative technology would have to play a major role in making this a reality.

It would take a societal paradigm shift.

Is this overwhelming?

Where is this happening?

Where do you start such a large scale change?

Why is the current education system like a giant elastic band. You can stretch it a long way but it always eventually springs back to its original shape. How do you snap the elastic band?

Your thoughts are encouraged.