Engaging with parents

Abstract

I remember witnessing a friend being reprimanded by a teacher at school when handing in their homework. The tone was cold and accusatory: ‘Did your parents help you with this?’ It couldn’t have been worse for them. Caught out. They had cheated! Actually, they hadn’t and fortunately we have moved on a long way since then. There is nothing more natural than parents wanting to engage and help with their children’s learning. It is as simple as Mum or Dad reading to their child before they go to bed or taking them to a museum or gallery. However, all too soon parents hit a wall: the maths isn’t how they did it at school; What is a phoneme?; What does a ‘3c’ really mean? With the amount of jargon around it is all too easy for educationalists to blind parents with acronyms and lingo. It is not intentional and in all fairness it is right for parents to understand that the bar has been raised, after all many of them were legacy children from a 1970’s and early 1980’s education that lacked the same rigour of today (but it was fun!). Also, society has moved on and along with it the types of skills required for a twenty-first-century citizen. So, how can parents feel meaningfully part of their child’s education in a way that doesn’t compromise rigour, but plays to their skills?