AKS Conference

Konferenza Nazzjonali 20 ta' Ottubru 2001

Ghalliema u Genituri: Shubija jew Shab:

Chairperson: Ms Mary Vella 
Rapporteur: Ms Nora Macelli

Participants focused on identifying the range of curricular roles that teachers should encourage parents to assume. . main roles were identified:

1. Participation in formal education: Teachers have a significant role to play in the nurturing of a sense of partnership so that parents feel that their role is complementary to that of teachers. Teachers can do this by demonstrating paired reading and story telling techniques. Parent capacity building in this area impacts on the curriculum of the home as well as creates a cadre of parents who can periodically assist the teacher in this area at school. Teachers can also invite parents to plan and deliver sessions to a class in such areas as crafts and cooking.
   

2. Participation in administrative tasks: Parents can be invited to provide their voluntary services in such administrative and logistical tasks as co-ordination of school transport, word processing, accounting, and recommending new textbooks.
   

3. Participation in the maintenance of the physical environment: Parents have a significant role to play by contributing their time, expertise, materials or financial resources towards the upkeep and embellishment of the physical environment of the school.
   

4. Extending experimental projects to parents: Schools can develop extension strategies through which new experiments can be extended to parents as well. The Let Me Learn Process, the Writing Process methodology, the Literacy Project, the Creative Thinking Skills method were all cited as examples of important learning processes that should be extended to parents. In this way, schools would be contributing to the development of a lifelong learning ethos among adult members of the community. The curriculum of the home would be indirectly strengthened as well.
   

5. On-going dialogue: Through the School Development Plan, teachers could devise ways whereby parents are both consulted about important curricular matters as well as encouraged to provide feedback about what they perceive as going badly or smoothly at school.

Other important curricular elements that impact directly on parents were mentioned. These include:

• Emotional environment: The way teachers welcome pupils and greet their parents in the morning has an important role in shaping the emotional environment of the school community. Similarly, the courteous way teachers communicate between themselves in corridors and during the break times provides students with key modelling of adult communication that pupils may comment upon when they're at home.
  

• Parent outreach: Schools should develop strategies that enable teachers to effectively communicate with parents who normally stay away from school. Parents who perceive themselves as inadequate and uneducated can be empowered to identify their unacknowledged strengths so that obstacles to nurturing and supporting their children's development and learning are removed.