Professional Practice
Standard 3: Plan for and implement effective teaching & learning
3.7: Engage Parents/Carers in the educative process
A description of strategies used to involve parents in collaboration with the supervising teacher of my Kindergarten classroom on my final placement.
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According to Vygotsky’s socio-cultural theory of education, children learn best in collaboration with teachers, parents, peers, and tools in their environments (ICT). Hence, some of the strategies to collaborate with parents in consultation with the supervising teacher were: attending parent-teacher conferences, informing parents via weekly emails about ongoing topics in key learning areas in the classroom and with administrative information, assigning homework to elicit supplementary support especially in areas of literacy and numeracy by involving parents in reading decodable readers signed by me in a homework diary record, and lastly by informing parents about their children’s progress by uploading progress reports onto a school electronic database.
Engaging parents in the educational process provided me with additional knowledge about my students to plan effectively for effective student-centered teaching and learning opportunities, as recommended by Skamp and Preston (2018), Woolfolk and Margetts (2013), and Ground-Water Smith, Ewing, and Le Cornu (2015). This is essential to support the engagement of students in their own learning journey.