Saturday, February 24, 2018

Parental involvement

This series of posts comes from a paper, Responsibility, Motivation and Engagement: How To Develop Learners Using Behavior Manager. It describes how Edclick’s Behavior Manager combines three essential capabilities.

1. Proactive PBIS tools to prevent student misbehavior
2. Reactive interventions and processes for misbehaviors to minimize loss of instruction time and keep students in school
3. Data and tools for continuous improvement

Parent involvement is highly correlated to student achievement. It’s important to get parents on your side. Just as with students, the best approach to building an effective relationship with parents is to be proactive. Start as early as possible and communicate expectations and rules. As with the students, keep it brief, 3 – 5 expectations that are most important to get across. Let the parents know how things will be working in the class and how the parents can be most helpful. Let them know about the cool things that the class will be doing. If the parents are excited about what’s coming up in the class, it’s likely they will transfer that enthusiasm to the student. Also be thinking about how to deliver a positive message about each student to the parents as early in the school year as possible.

You and the parents have one important thing in common: you both want what’s best for the child. It’s as important to know their expectations as it is important for them to know yours. If problems arise with a student, it’s helpful to have a relationship with the parents to help resolve them.

How to send and track notifications, personal messages and newsletters in Behavior Manager

Behavior Manager automatically notifies parents of behavior referrals. Make sure that parents also hear from you about the good news.

In addition to automatic notifications, Behavior Manager has two other important features for building relationships with parents, the contact log and flash messages.

The contact log makes a record of all the parent notifications that are automatically sent for behavior notifications. It also allows you to record other contacts you’ve made with the parents by phone or email. Then you can review the contacts, the reasons for them and their outcomes through the contact log reports. Below is an example of the contacts made between the school and the parents of Huck Finn. There have been two discipline referral notifications and one introductory message.

From here you can explore other messages, show contacts to parents of all students, change date ranges and so on.

Behavior Manager makes it easy to send messages to parents using flash messages. Flash messages can be sent to the parents of an individual student or to groups of parents such as all 9^th graders or the parents of Ms. Armey’s period 2 Biology class. The flash messages can be automatically personalized with the student’s name, useful when sending to large groups.

The most effective communication with parents is when it’s two-way. In addition to keeping parents informed about what is going on at school, make it easy for them to provide feedback. Consider sending out a survey once or twice a year when parents can let you know if they are getting enough (or too much) information from you and from the school.

Behavior histories in Behavior Manager

Another important communication with parents is talking to them about behavior issues. It is important that these discussions be based on facts. Behavior Manager automatically creates a behavior history for each student which includes both information about recognition for positive behavior as well as misbehaviors and consequences. This data is extremely valuable, especially when a parent feels that her son has been unfairly penalized. When detailed facts are presented, those arguments typically evaporate.

Key: Keep in mind that when a student is having behavior issues at school, it is especially important to keep parents notified of things the student is doing well.

The behavior history is also available through the Behavior Manager student and parent portal. They can keep up to date whenever they wish. Also available to parents on the portal is a database of parent tips. The parent tips cover a wide range of parenting issues. If their child is having a specific behavior problem at school, the parent tips may include useful suggestions on what parents can do about it.

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Keywords: Responsible-Motivated-Engaged, Behavior Manager