Educators value the involvement and support of parents, guardians, families and communities in schools.
Throughout my practicums, I tried to involve my students’ families in their learning as much as possible. Due to covid limiting the amount of direct involvement parents could have at schools, this was difficult at times. I did, however, find ways to keep my students’ parents in the loop.
In both my 490 and 491 practicums, I communicated with my students’ parents via weekly newsletters, letting them know what we were doing during the week. In my 490 practicum, as it was late in the year, I adopted my coaching teacher’s practice of emailing weekly newsletters to the parents every Friday afternoon. These included pictures of things the students had done throughout the week, anecdotes of anything exciting that happened, as well as an outline of what was going to be happening the next week. A lot of parents expressed thanks and enjoyment of being able to see what their kids were up to despite not being allowed in the school, and students throughout the week would tell my coaching teacher or myself about things they thought should be included, either in words or in pictures.
Since I started 491 so early in the year, I had more flexibility in how I wanted to reach out to my parents. My coaching teacher had already set up a Class Dojo for the class, which is a website that each students’ parents have a profile for where the teacher can post updates and announcements and the parents have a way of easily privately messaging the teacher. I took over weekly update posts a week into my practicum, where I would post either Sunday evenings or Monday mornings a Week At A Glance as well as giving more detail on anything important that was going on during the week. Parents would like and comment on the post, and I had access to an easy way to get in touch with them or for them to get in touch with me. I also used this as a way to share students’ artwork that we hung on the walls for a while with pictures, or any other exciting work we were doing in class.
The Class Dojo program was one that I found to be very useful and a great tool during this practicum, but it definitely requires buy-in from the parents. While this is definitely a tool I would consider using again, if the buy in isn’t high, an email update or a printed newsletter would work just as well for keeping parents updated on their children’s schooling.