- Image by Michael Ignatieff via Flickr
Recently, the National Center for Family Literacy (NCFL), a wonderful organization dedicated to promoting literacy and alleviating poverty, contacted me about writing a blog post on ways that parents can constructively be involved in their child’s education. NCFL focuses on accomplishing its mission by offering tools, training, and resources for a family-oriented approach to literacy and education, so a post on how to get involved – helpfully – fit right in.
Having just finished a massive, school-by-school tour of all the schools in our area, this subject was still fairly fresh in my mind, so it was easy to write. In fact, I had done so many of these one-on-one tours with teachers and administrators that I found I had a lot of information jostling about in my head, because those tours were essentially hours of listening. Listening and watching. It was fascinating, and it was also illuminating. It is a difficult time to be a primary and secondary school teacher or school administrator, as many of the demands and expectations that parents, kids, and society have of the educational system are conflicting and hard to meet. At the same time, it is a strange time to be a parent of a child in the educational system. Do you helicopter parent? Encourage technology? Restrict it? Monitor it fiercely? These debates make the tensions between various newborn and toddler parenting styles look positively comical.
So with that introduction, take a look at my post on the role of parents in a child’s education, especially at the issue of managing your child’s relationship with their teachers, their school, their curriculum, and their social and life skills development. I’d especially welcome any feedback from teachers and administrators out there. And while you are visiting NCFL, take a look around the site! They have some great tools there. Thanks!
