Engage Parents In their Childrens Early Learning - Assignment Example

 Engage parents in their children’s early learning 3.1. Explain personal, social, and cultural Barriers to parents being involved in their children’s early learning 3.1.1. Define and explain personal barriers to parent’s involvement to their children early learning Personal barriers are factors that limit or prevent parents from achieving their objectives of getting more involved in various aspects of their children’s education[Tas10]. The major internal barrier is the parent’s mentality that enhances feelings of helplessness and inability to change their situation. Some external barriers hindering parents’ involvement in early education include those existing at school while internal or individual obstacles result from social economic situations like poverty, social exclusion, work pattern, and personal assumption regarding parental roles[Bru11]. 3.1.2. Explain Social Barriers to parent involve their children learning Social barriers result from cultural institutions and structure that encroach on individuals including ethnicity and gender[Tas10]. Social barriers influence the ability of parents to participate in their children’s early learning and include asylum seekers, travellers, disabled parents, foster carers, and parents located remotely from the school. While some parents find it, difficult to integrate into the school community others demonstrate reluctance or failure to attend school meetings that could affect their level of involvement in school. 3.1.3. Cultural barriers to parent involvement in the learning of their children Cultural barriers involve lack of recognition of values that are not automatically acquainted with different cultural attitudes towards child rearing except those of the natives. Cultural barriers are common especially for immigrants, refugees, and travelling parents who find it difficult to integrate into culturally different schools. 3.1.4. Time Barriers Time barriers are common especially for families with parents working, single parent, or more than one child[Smi99]. Two working parents’ means there is shortage of time to participate in school activities or assist children with schoolwork at home. Additionally single parents have too much on their schedule with little or no time left for participation in children learning.[Bru11] 3.1.5. Explain Circumstance barriers Circumstance barriers including school governance regulations create a barrier to parent involvement especially by holding regular parents meetings with parents to inform them of new school regulations[Tas10]. The resulting structure of the school creates circumstances that are uncertain to the parents. 3.1.6. Language and Literacy barriers Language barriers are common between schools and immigrant parents with only one language of communication[Smi99]. In such cases, the schools do not effectively engage the parent into school activities. In addition, literacy barriers prevent parents from assisting children with schoolwork at home. 3.1.7. Emotional barriers Emotional barriers comprise of both mental and physical aspects of an individual and involve bodily, expressive behaviour or physiological responses. Emotional parents, teachers or students create a barrier to involvement in child’s early learning especially the exercise of expressive behaviour. 3.2. Explain and demonstrate strategies used to overcome barriers to parental involvement in child’s learning 3.2.1. Different types of strategies to overcome parental involvement barriers The three major types of strategies to overcome barriers to parental involvement are parent-oriented strategies, teachers-oriented strategies and child-oriented strategies[Bar06]. With teachers-oriented strategies, the teacher learns how to deal with various types of parents and students while demonstrating a rational and emotional intelligence attitude. This way, the teachers or their actions will not hinder any parent from participating say unwelcoming, emotional, poor attitude among others. Children-focused strategies will educate children on how to work both at school and at home and accept the guidance of their parents. 3.2.2. Range of strategies to assist in overcoming barriers to parental involvement. The parent-based strategies involve, provision of educational materials like booklets, leaflets, videos, and online tools that can inform parents about the latest improvements in parental involvement in their children’s learning. The aim is to raise awareness of desired change, curriculum, subjects, and frequent progress reports, and combining them with other strategies like educational meetings, educational outreach visits, opinion leaders, and educational audit and feedback. Educational meetings involve conferences, training and lectures that are interactive in nature for facilitate involvement improvement. Educational outreach visits. For parents that cannot get to the school due to sickness, distance, or other barriers, the school can organise outreach visits close to such parents and educating them on the relevance of involvement in children learning. Such visits can also include customization to individual barriers and situations for efficiency. During meetings, opinion leaders can inspire parents to achieve the best outcomes possible during involvement in children learning. 3.3. Explain how attitude can be barriers to engaging parents in their children’s early learning 3.3.1. Attitude barriers Attitude refers to the disposition of a person towards something and can be negative or positive. Negative attitude is often a barrier in parents’ involvement in the learning of their children especially for fathers[Omo08]. For most schools, staff attitude is a great barrier towards parental involvement. Uninformed teachers have a tendency to view parent’s absence in school as ignorance on their children’s education. Further, parents with the experience of unwelcoming or alienating schools tend to believe that the teachers do not care about them and their children and decide never to involve themselves in school related learning activities. Conversely, some parents have negative attitudes towards themselves and towards learning, hence negatively affecting their participation in their children’s learning. The results is the view that their children are being overburdened with academic work with little time to play. 4.1. Culturally sensitive ways of working with parents to provide support in their children is learning 4.1.1. Kinds of cultural sensitive ways to assist parents to support children Culturally sensitive strategies for use by schoolteachers and administrators should include defining a mission statement and setting goals that precisely express the school’s commitment to culturally responsive and meaningful involvement; and conducting a parent’s survey and record their concerns, ideas and perspectives[Tho02]. Using the findings, the school should then allocate a family liaison, create family space or room at school, plan parent-teachers seminars or parent-teacher team building activities for relationship building, explaining learning standards, identifying ways to improve children’s self-confidence and self-respect among others; and developing a school cultural resource binder or translator[Col08]. 4.1.2. Ways of working with culture sensitive parents To demonstrate appreciation of working with culture sensitive parents, the school should appreciate the environments where families come from to enable them to interpret children priorities regarding education[Sha11]. This is crucial especial due to variations in cultural assumptions and views in the role of children like taking care of younger siblings and contributing to family chores, which would hinder effective parent involvement. Secondly, schools should educate and their teachers and staff about being culturally sensitive to equip them with the best approach to deal with different parent norms and customs such that parents feel appreciated and confident with the school [Den96]. Schools should also seek the assistance of cultural interpreters prior to or during meetings or interactions with parents ensure that parents understand the need for involvement in children’s learning. 4.1.3. Role of practitioners and settings in the provision of culturally sensitive support to parents Culturally sensitive practitioners are aware of and address the parents and students’ ethnic and cultural needs coupled with their social, cognitive, and emotional needs for their cooperation[Can08]. This means that culturally responsive interactions should focus on implementing parent-oriented information delivery through translations to reflect on parent’s values, beliefs, and culture. The practitioners must also embrace that diverse parents have varying ways of information processing and should as much as possible try to carefully listen and try to understand each parent and respond to any issues. In striving to develop positive relations with the parents, practitioners must develop a setting that appreciates parents and families’ cultural, language, and religious background to develop settings that are considerate and that enable all parents to become effective partners in their children’s learning[Gay10]. 4.2. Ways of working with parents to enable them to offer parent appropriate support to children’s early learning 4.2.1. Role of practitioner The practitioner is responsible for offering parenting skills, home-school communication, and decision making at school, and collaborating with the community. Offering parenting skills includes assisting families to establish homes that prepare children to learn[Bar06]. This is possible through holding meetings with families who need assistance, allowing parents to share about children’s needs, talents, background, and culture. Home-school communication involves updating parents on the child’s performance at school and encouraging parent to share home events[Omo08]. This can be achieved through annual parent-teacher conference with regular communications, consider parents with reading issues and arrange phone calls in native language, and observing schedules where useful memos, notices or newsletters are sent to parents. Learning at home allows a practitioner to inform parents on the best ways to assist students to learn considering essential learning standards depending on student grade, and clearly defining homework policies and offering homework that facilitate child-parent interaction[Mos05]. In order to involve the parents, the practitioner ensures that decision making at school includes parent leaders’ opinions[Bar06]. The attainment of collaboration is through identification and use of community resources that reinforce school programs like mentoring, tutoring, and recreational services. 4.2.2. My role in supporting parents My main involvement is through home-school communication and collaboration with the community. I use home-school communication as tool to assist parents to understand instructions based on the classroom learning requirements. In some instances, I disagree with parents on what the assignment expectations are and such opportunities assist me seeing things through the parent’s perspective. Collaboration with the community is essential in organization talent shows where community members appreciate different talents in children and the role of parents in developing such talents. 4.3. Identify and explain support and change needed to improve my own skills and knowledge 4.3.1. Change needed as a practitioner So far, I am aware of socio-cultural differences of my pupils and their families. However, I need to be aware of the socio-cultural differences amongst the pupils themselves. For instance, it has been hard dealing with African Americans in my class given the different cultural backgrounds amongst Africans themselves[Gor97]. Consequently, I have faced numerous instances where I have failed to understand the thinking and behaving of such students since I have no idea about their race, ethnicity, language, culture, and social class. This change is essential to avoid my own biases and discriminatory attitudes towards certain groups. 4.3.2. Support skills that needs improvement With the requirement to embrace culturally responsive teaching, I still need to improve by developing a positive attitude in pupils, parents, and myself[Can08]. The main avenue to explore this requirement is possible through holding culturally responsive conferences to enable parents to relate learning activities with experiences and encouraging children to make choice on content subject to their values, strengths, and experiences. 4.3.3. Skills and knowledge needed to build on my own practice To improve my practice especially through inclusion of multimedia and other technologies, I need training on basic computer application for teachers. This will be essential for my classroom work and during conferences with parents and teachers where I need to make presentations. 4.3.4. Skills and knowledge I have strong interpersonal skills and am social which makes it possible to interact freely with parents and children. I also have excellent communication skills in that I am able to listen to parents and children’s views and offer informed decisions and support. Reference list Tas10: , (Tassoni, et al., 2010), Bru11: , (Bruce, et al., 2011), Smi99: , (Smit, et al., 1999), Bar06: , (Barnados' National Children's Resource Centre, 2006), Omo08: , (Omollo, 2008, p. 24), Tho02: , (Thoma, 2002, pp. 5-10), Col08: , (Cole, 2008), Sha11: , (Share, et al., 2011), Den96: , (Dennis & Giangreco, 1996, pp. 103-106), Can08: , (Cantu, 2008), Gay10: , (Gay, 2010), Omo08: , (Omollo, 2008), Mos05: , (Moss & Petrie, 2005), Gor97: , (Gorman & Balter, 1997), Read More