Parents have signed up and agreed to take the 10-week challenge and agreed to the start date and time.
Your ultimate purpose is to build a community with the strength of its foundation being parent involvement. Therefore, as parents buy-in and offer their consent, you should gather information as this will be an essential source with which you will build a school community. Also, demographic information and the types of contact with parents—face-to-face, telephone, email, and/or text messaging—should be collected.
With every workshop, you must be organized, your tools and resources prepared, and the workshop location secure and ready. (This should be done at least one day before the start of the workshop.) Depending on your start time, allow approximately ½ hour for participants to arrive and about 30 minutes for refreshments.
The community you are creating requires you to promote the importance of parent involvement. Integration of the model is an expectation instead of a singular event. This can be accomplished by video recording each workshop activity with parent and teacher consent. The goal is to share information and demonstrate what is possible with parental involvement. Video recordings of workshops can be posted on school websites and archived with parent and teacher “testimonials” of their experiences.
Begin by acknowledging the importance of parents’ commitment to attend and discuss the benefits their involvement will have on their children. Then, provide the parents with the 10-week workshop curriculum and emphasize that they will be competing against each other to win prizes.
The emphasis is on “breaking the ice” and reshaping the parent-teacher relationship through current academic information and behavioral observations about their children and activities to engage the parents. At the end of the first workshop, the parents should walk away with two experiences: a current snapshot of the teachers’ impressions of their children balanced with an engaging and fun activity to reduce barriers. This will replace biannual parent-teacher conferences.
Click the link below to access challenge activity.