Involving families in the education of our students is crucial to their success. Beyond just involving families, schools need to strive for family engagement and the creation of partnerships between school, home, and community. When there is a greater focus on fostering more meaningful and personal connections, the school, community, and families can work together to provide the support, structure and make decisions for the benefit of student achievement.

Schools can refer to the many resources with tips for promoting engagement. To get started, here are five different ways to “connect, engage and sustain” family involvement.

  1. Communication Tools: By using social media tools such as Twitter or Instagram, school leaders and classrooms can transmit messages quickly and with a far reach. Tools such as Remind, or BloomzApp enable teachers and parents to communicate and also share information quickly.
  2. Video Tools: Sharing news about student work, or creating a lesson for students to view outside of class, can be done with tools such as Educreations, Flipgrid, or Screencastify.
  3. Blogging/Class Webpage: Maintaining a classroom space in the form of a blog or a class website, can be done easily using tools like Kidblog, Padlet, Edmodo or other web-based learning platforms.
  4. School and Community: There are a lot of possibilities for amplifying student learning by connecting with and sharing news of school events within the community itself.
  5. Family Activities: Finding ways to involve parents in the learning process can be a challenge. A good opportunity to co-learn is to take part in something called “family playlist”. A family playlist, devised by PowerMyLearning, basically has the student becoming the “teacher”.

Read the full article about family engagement by Rachelle Dene Poth at Getting Smart.