Day Three - Summer Conference Day

Today was our summer conference day. It was an interesting day with lots of disucssion about issues important to education. I especially liked the keynote address from Dr.'s Phil and Diane Ferguson. They spoke about relationships between family and school. Some of their key points were:

1. When families are involved students achieve more
2. School's do not often work hard to engage families
3. School's think of parents in two ways - as being a resource or needing resources
4. We often engage in circular logic - talking past each other about a common thread, the student

In thinking further about how to engage parents in the school I found this link to the Ontario ministry of education which includes tips on how to engage parents:
http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/parents/involvement/

I thought it would have some solid suggestions on how to engage parents. However, it was a short list of 6 suggestions, all of which were pretty basic and didn't talk at all about engaging in open dialogue about their child. Mostly they were related to parents being a resource, and not actually engaged.

I found the following video, created by an education student, on how to engage parents more in the life of a school.

At 11:00 the narrator lists a variety of creative methods to include parents in school - above and beyond chaperoning a field trip.