Best PD EVER!: PT Camp 2014

Goooooooooood MORNING PT Campers!

This was a welcome greeting each time we checked our Voxes during a 6 week PD we experienced this summer involving the book, Beyond the Bake Sale:  The Essential Guide to Family/School Partnerships by Anne T. Henderson, Karen L. Mapp, Vivian R. Johnson, and Don Davies.  Over 100 people from all over the world participated.  Participants included teachers, parents, administrators, and specialists.  We learned about and discussed topics such as why partnerships are important, how to build relationships, guidelines for action, and resources and tools. In order to look at the information through a similar lens we broke up into smaller groups during the 5th week in order to determine how we would take what we learned back to our schools, districts, staff, parents, and students.  In other words how would we actually implement some of the ideas we learned about?  This blog shares the ideas of our small group.  We hope it will help other groups similar to this group think about ways to  implement and improve family/school engagement in their districts.

Our small group consisted of Geniene Delahunty; ESL specialist from Northern Kentucky, Shari Hardinger; ECSE Autism Behavior Specialist from Shawnee Mission Kansas, and Sanoe Marfil, Program Associate Director from Wai’anae Hawai’i.  Our roles are a bit different than a teacher or administrator in that we either travel from building to building, work with a range of different age groups/grade levels, or work with a large number of teachers, yet we do not have complete control or say over the buildings we work as an administrator would.  Sanoe’s role is a little different too. She works with public schools and preschools in the development of creating outdoor classrooms that serve as a intergenerational space to teach Hawaiian culture and language.

Geniene shared that implementing learning from this PLN in the elementary building where she worked would be easier since she has history in that building. With a targeted goal of increasing support systems and networks for her EL families she also plans to build staff capacity by increasing confidence in reaching out to EL parents. The middle and high school buildings are new to her as a teacher (not as a parent) so the plan for the first year is to tap into the family engagement activities that currently exist and build relationships. A way to keep accountability will be to keep these goals in conversation at team and staff meetings.

 

Shari shared that implementing learning from this PLN would include helping staff and parents become more familiar with the ECSE center’s website as well as beefing up the center’s website to include more community resources, event announcements, monthly activities and learning themes.  Other areas of implementation would include increasing staff’s knowledge of social media such as Voxer, Twitter, and FaceBook.  Finally, organization/information tools/apps such as Remind and Class Messenger would be introduced to the staff as ways to keep parents more informed and involved in activities and events throughout the school year.

Sanoe shared that her organization serves as a resource for the community.  INPEACE provides information and resources for families that can help in areas like early childhood education, health, post secondary education, land stewardship, financial, legal, and workforce development. As a parent she believes that the schools her children attend could implement more forms of communication and access in the social media arena. Improvement in newsletters, family activities as well as open house could all use some tweaking.