Week 25 Act on plan

Week 25

Activity 1

As educators we believe it is vital that we reflect and act on our practices and pedagogy to create positive changes.

‘Change does not always equal improvement or transformation. There may be cases where teachers change what they are doing only to find not much has changed for their learners. New actions arising from an inquiry can only be considered good if learner outcomes and experiences have changed for the better. Regardless of the outcome, there is always something to learn from changing practices. The spiral of inquiry is designed to build professional curiosity. There is no place for blame or shame’.

Kaser, L. & J. Halbert. (2017) The Spiral Playbook: Leading with an inquiring mindset in school systems and schools.

In the previous assignment I said that I would work on the following steps

• Research online methods on ways to engage parents in students learning
• Ask colleagues at team meetings about what methods they use to encourage parent involvement especially at the senior level of the school.
• Consider ethical issues that will arise from collecting data from chosen community.
• Use anonymous forums to collect data from parents.

I created a post on Facebook asking colleagues at other schools what they use to communicate with their parents and Seesaw was a very popular App, many schools have had success with it as it allows you to communicate with parents as a group as well as on an individual basis. Parents are able to share their thought and opinions using this App as well.

I am aware that parents would have to download the App onto their devices where as Facebook is already present on many parents devices and may be an easier/more effective so I will be looking at setting up both to see which is more effective.

I also spoke to my team members at team meetings to see how they are communicating with their parents - they are currently using Facebook and Class Dojo. They did mention that they feel Class Dojo isn’t as popular as the parents have to login the app and it is separate to the social media that they use on a daily basis. Parents seem to respond more using the Facebook platform as it comes up on their newsfeed and you can directly tag certain parents to posts. I feel the downfall of this would be that you can't share individual information with parents about their child’s learning without all parents seeing, this will be something I look into further.

I have created a survey for parents to gain their voice in regards their engagement/involvement with the school and their child’s learning. This went out to 385 parents and we received 108 back. Initially my group was going to just send it to the parents from our classes, however, our principal wanted to take it school wide as it is valuable data that we can use in Senior Management. Here are some of our responses from parents.

When we were collecting the data from parents we were very aware of not causing harm, distress and anxiety. We made sure that all surveys were kept private at all times as they were anonymous. When we interviewed a few parents all names were kept of documents and only the 3 group members knew the identity.