Tools of Engagement

Sharon Peters recently blogged her thoughts on the recent report by the Quebec English School Boards Association on Internet Use.  I was curious to find out if the report looked at how school boards and their associated schools used Internet tools to communicate with parents and communities so I read the full report (Towards Empowerment, Respect and Accountability  PDF here). 

While the research did not address my questions it did make some very interesting recommendations about involving parents in the development of a technology-rich school environment.  The report clearly encourages us to move from seeing the Internet as a “threat” to embracing it as an “opportunity”.

The QESBA Task Force set out a framework of prinicples to guide policy and practice which includes the following:

…parents can and must be active partners in better understanding the dynamics and impact of new technologies on their children, and in engaging and guiding them in the responsible and accountable use of those technologies.

There are many good recommendations in the report, but the following are pertinent to parental involvement.

• Educate and involve community partners in responsible and informed Internet use
  • Involve students, teachers and parents directly in developing and delivering (as well as receiving) information, skills and approaches on rules of Internet use, conduct and respect for privacy.
  • Enhance on-going and open communications between school and home on these issues. Seek to involve the co-operation, collaboration and participation of parents who are a key source behind the possibility for action and change.
  • Provide accessible materials, interactive training for interested parents on Internet use and abuse, appropriate supervision techniques and modeling behavior for their own consideration.

The authors of the report also recognized the importance of involving students in this process. I particularly like the following statement:

The task force has learned of a pressing need for educational and transformative approaches and preventative practices to more fully engage students in dialogue, provide them with responsibility, leadership and learning opportunities within ethical frameworks that guide both young people and adult stakeholders to appreciate the impact of their words and expressions on others.  

And this recommendation:

• Encourage young technology users to work with adults to teach them more about the technologies, and show confidence in their expertise.

 The QESBA report encourages a reasoned, balanced and collaborative approach to embracing 21C tools. Hopefully it will be read by school boards and governance bodies across Canada.

Thank you Sharon for bringing it to my attention.

Recently Cindy Seibel wrote a post asking the question “Can there be too much information for parents?” (you can read her post “Is it ever too much?” here and read the original story in the NY Times ”I know what you did in Math Class” here)

As a parent interested in engaging other parents in our education system I wondered if these web service companies would go beyond what a parent would need to assess their own child’s performance - could they be used to increase the involvement of parents in schools, and ultimately to engage parents in school improvement planning? I decided to explore a few of these commercial school data systems and as in everything I found there is a wide variety of services - some simply offer parents access to information on grades, homework, and attendance, while others go much further and provide tools for multi-level communication and collaboration.   

Those of us involved in education governance often discuss the role of communication in increasing parent involvement/engagement, we talk about the processof communication.  Some of us see great potential in using web technology to improve this process - to reach more people where they are, when they want and how they want. Web tools such as blogs, wikis, nings and webcasts provide us with a lot of options for reaching parents (and many of them are free!). So in the absence of an integrated school community management system accessible to parents these tools could be quite useful.

But what kind of information should we be sharing to improve collaboration? What do parents need to know and discuss in order to be engaged in schools?

In my province we are a long way from finding that tipping point from enough information to too much.  A large number of parents I talk to do not feel really connected to what is happening with their child in the classroom, and fewer are aware of what is happening educationally on a school wide basis. They want to have more frequent contact with classroom teachers as well as school administrators. Until parents feel there is adequate communication with teachers and principals can we really expect them to feel comfortable in a open, collaborative school improvement process?