The other interesting topic in chapter eight was the part on connecting classrooms to community. I believe that on Guam this is a major problem. Because majority of parents really do not know what goes on in the classroom. I know that GPSS has made some effort in trying new ways to involve parents in their children education such as; daily planners that let parents know what is going on and if their child has homework. But there is a big fall back to the daily planners, student must bring the planners to school every day and right their homework or other events in the planners themselves. Really think about it how many students actually use their planners. In my classroom I had to give my students an incentive like bonus points every time they bring in their planner, but even at that only about a total of 10 of my students brought them in.
Then we go back to this whole issue about parent teacher conference. Believe or not I believe this whole system really does not work. We meet with parents every quarter to let parents know what the progress of their child is. But when it comes down to it only parents of students who are passing come to the parent teacher conference. For last two years for my teacher conference I had a total of 14 parents within those two years.
The book mentions some modern technologies that can help make connections between students in school and out-of-school activities. For example, the “transparent school” (Bauch, 1997) uses telephones and answering machines to help parents understand the daily assignments in classrooms. Teachers need only a few minutes per day to dictate assignments into an answering machine. Parents can call at their convenience and retrieve the daily assignments, thus becoming informed of what their children are doing in school (224). I think this is a great idea because it stops the big hassle of parents trying to guess if their child as homework or not.
Then we go back to this whole issue about parent teacher conference. Believe or not I believe this whole system really does not work. We meet with parents every quarter to let parents know what the progress of their child is. But when it comes down to it only parents of students who are passing come to the parent teacher conference. For last two years for my teacher conference I had a total of 14 parents within those two years.
The book mentions some modern technologies that can help make connections between students in school and out-of-school activities. For example, the “transparent school” (Bauch, 1997) uses telephones and answering machines to help parents understand the daily assignments in classrooms. Teachers need only a few minutes per day to dictate assignments into an answering machine. Parents can call at their convenience and retrieve the daily assignments, thus becoming informed of what their children are doing in school (224). I think this is a great idea because it stops the big hassle of parents trying to guess if their child as homework or not.
2 comments:
We had a voice-mail system at St. Johns a few years ago. Although we were encouraged to use it, few teachers did. It was too inconvenient to get to a phone during the school day to check or record messages. Now that I think of it, this was before cell phones were so prevelant but it doesn't seem that long ago. We have long used planners and still do up to the 8th grade fairly successfully. We also had a period of TeachersWeb where each teacher had a web page to post assignments, anouncements, etc. Currently we are using MyGradeBook.com which is an online grading program the parents can access with a password to see their child's grades. The results of this are mixed. First, the teachers are pressured to keep updating their grades-some parents check it daily. Second, I find it has distanced me from parents more. We rely on the parent checking the page rather than communicating directly. It does let me send grade notices for a class simulataneously via email at the press of a button though. So we are becoming more connected to parents but in an artificial way.
Classroom websites are the most positive example of connecting to the community, I think. Plus students can help with it.
I believe in your idea, but for high school teachers, it is one hard attempt. With the limited phone lines in school, we are very hesitant to use our cell phones or house phones to tempt our students to call back.
Now the question is, why should high school students need to have teachers call parents to inform them of homework? Well, because students are not responsible enough to go home and perform the task on their own. Their response to parents when asked "Do you have homework" usually is "no." They are even clever with their reasons.
Either way, we all need to get in sync with each other: parent, teacher, school, etc... Some way other than phone conversations (at least for me).
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