This week I had the privilege of being invited to present at the EduTech Asia Conference in Singapore.
Putting oneself out there and sharing in any public forum is scary. I am thankful to have not only survived, but thrived. The stress of preparing, practicing, and getting up in front of the crowds quickly faded. And as I shared the heart and soul of my research with strangers this week the experience suddenly became an important affirmation of the past two and a half years of my academic and professional work.
You know you are doing something right when the response to your workshop is "your school is amazing, I want to send my kids to your school." No better feedback than that, for me and for the wonderful teachers and parents at the Canadian International School in Bangalore who have embraced the Bloomz App and have become true pioneers in education along with me.
I posed the two questions above at the opening of my presentation this week. These are questions Joyce Epstein, the mother of parent involvement research, posed back in a 2010 video interview. I believe the answers to these questions are found in smartphone Apps that are now purposely designed to promote effective home-school communication.
The paradigm shift
Over thirty years of research has clearly proven a positive correlation between parent involvement and student achievement. Yet, parent involvement remains a very under-potentialized area in education. To this day very few teachers, or administrators for that matter, receive training on the basic principles behind effective parent communication. Nor do they learn about involvement strategies. Yet each and every day all teachers everywhere engage with parents, or even worse, don't.
In terms of parent involvement, I believe education is on the brink of an important paradigm shift. Times, technology, and tools are quickly changing and school practices must too. Too many schools are run through the motions with their traditional strategies for involvement that simply don't work. How many parents did you have attend your last parent coffee? It simply isn’t enough to claim you are involving all parents. I argue that random, one off, infrequent, or one-way communication from schools (including report cards) are not effective influencers of home-school culture and do not necessarily lead to parent-teacher partnerships.
Additionally, research recognizes that there are barriers to traditional forms of parent involvement that schools need to design solutions to overcome in order to effectively involve all families. Some of the more prominent barriers include a lack of time, gender inequities, language ability, and differences in culture and expectations between home and school. So why do educators hang on to their old practices? I think for one it's because it is all we have ever known. But also, we have never had the right training or tools.
New Apps and greater access to smartphones, wifi and mobile data offer schools a powerful way of increasing parent involvement. These smartphone Apps change the way schools organize their work and provide educators with the opportunity to involve all parents, not just the small percentage eager to be involved.
By regularly documenting learning and providing families with ongoing and timely information-rich invitations for involvement from school, teacher, and child straight to the tips of their fingers empowers parents and has the potential to produce a greater overlap in spheres of influence between home and school.
The opportunity to share my evolving research and CIS's innovative practices involving parents using Bloomz has been so motivating and reaffirming for me. Education is on the brink of a paradigm shift that will benefit all students, families and schools. I am excited to be at the cutting edge of both practice and research.
If you would like more information about this innovative new approach to parent involvement and strategies to effectively implement Bloomz or Apps like it in your school please don't hesitate to reach out to me.
Email: martinthomasedd@gmail.com
Oh, and Singapore's Merlion ranks right up there as one of my favorite selfie spots in the world. Each time I'm there I just can't help myself! I call these shots the "hair wash" and the "science experiment gone wrong"