Done by: Maryam Khawaja Shaikh

Manar Hasan JasimKhlood Subhi Al-Fodhala

1 . Description

2 . Methods

3 . Results

4 . Conclusion

Type of Research: Quantitative (Survey) and Qualitative (Descriptive Studies).Researchers: Elizabeth Graue and Christopher P. Brown.Research Question: What do teacher educators need to know about the idea prospective teachers bring into their education to support interaction with families? Purpose: to make our curriculum more responsive to the experiences and beliefs of our students. With a commitment to supporting more equitable relationships between parents and teachers, we wanted to help prospective teachers see parents as collaborative in education who had much to contribute.Sample: 130 newly admitted undergraduate teacher education students at a large public university in the Midwestern United States in 2001 (75 students in the elementary program and 55 students in secondary program).Methods: Survey.

Increasing parent connections to school will result in higher academic achievement, improved attendance, and better grade for students, more positive attitudes for parents and students improved parent's satisfaction and reduce parental stereotyping by teachers.

130 admitted undergraduate teacher education students at large public university in the Mid Western United States in the fall of 2001.Those teachers must have completed at least two years of general studies in the university. They surveyed 75 students in the elementary program and 55 students in the secondary programs during a core course in the first month of their professional sequence.

This survey is part of a broader project examining student’s developments of beliefs about home-school relation during a teacher education program.

This broader project includes surveys across the five semesters of their professional program, analyses of course syllabi, interviews with instructors and interviews with a small sample of prospective teachers as they make their way through the program. We report only the results of the first semester survey in this research.

** They designed a study that would provide descriptive examination of incoming teacher education student’s conceptions of home-school relations, balancing attention to the large number of students in our programs with the complex challenge of understanding belief and experience.

** The survey research provide a window on the belief and memories of approximately 130 students as they begin their teacher education programs.

• Is designed to assess the beliefs, memories, and proposed practice of prospective teachers to illuminate the social and cultural understandings teachers bring to their professional education.

• The items on parental and teacher knowledge and ascription of levels involvement for various cultural and social sub groups of parents were derived from interpretive scholarship. The survey had a total of 90 items -87 ratings and 3 open response- and took an average of 20 min for students to complete.

1- Gender.

2- Race/Ethnicity.

3- Date of birth.

4- Mother’s highest level of education.

5- Childhood community.

6- Parental status.

Parenting: Assistance with parenting skills, development, and educational home environment.

Communicating: Fostering home-to-school and school-to-communication about programs and students progress.

Volunteering: Coordinating recruitment, support, and scheduling of families to work at school or other location to support student learning.

Learning at home: Developing activities to promote home-based learning.

Decision making: Involving families in school decision making and governance.

Collaboration: Coordinating community actors to support school programs and student learning.

1- What memories do prospective teachers hold of their own family’s school involvement?

2- How do they conceptualize the knowledge and roles of parents and teachers in education?

3- How do they anticipate that they will involve families in their own teaching?

** Survey of teachers indicate that elementary schools are more likely to have stronger positive programs of parents involvement that secondary schools.

1- Past as a foundation for the present.

•Parents can spend time in a classroom they can see how their kids and others socially interact.

• Also, parents should ask daily how school was, what they learned and what happened.

2- Who knows what?

•Parents must know about what is going in their child's school for example they must know what kinds of home works that school give to their child.

•parents must know about their child's relation with their teachers and other students. And they must encourage and motivate their child to learn, achieve, and to be successful.

•Parents must ask for equal treatment for all students and equal opportunities.

•Teachers must know what is going in her/his students lives for example they have problems in their lives so teacher can encourage her/his students to learn in the class and forget what is going in the home.

3- Expectations of involvement.

•All parents must be involved in their child's education without seeing their gender, education and qualifications, culture, work status, and family structure.

•Also parents must be involved through helping in doing home works, asking about what is going in the school, and participating in school activities.

•There are some parents who don't give time for their child and they said that they are not interested in it and they are so busy or maybe they said that school must think first about our demand then we will involve for example they ask school to give her/his child special care, so they don’t motivate their child to learn effectively so s/he will not do well at school and not be a successful person.

4- Into the future.• In the future teachers must develop this kind of involvement because they think that it help students to get higher grade so they can graduate a good persons for the future who can develop their countries.

• The authors advocated greater attention to families in teacher education; because it is the only way we can see to make the relationships more equitable.

• Capitalizing on the interpretive scholarship that shown that opportunities are available to only certain groups.

• Focusing on teaching as a responsive act, one that requires knowledge and respect for the skills and competencies of those being taught.

• If students are located within key family relationships, responding to families is part of teaching.

• the aim of suggestions is to helping prospective teachers to understand the rich potentials inherent in school-home relations.

• The suggestions are based on both the result of survey and previous scholarship.

• Prospective teacher come to their professional education with well-developed notions of the interactions that families should have with school.

• They have lived a life that included family interaction with educators.• have a developing conceptualization of how home and school might productive

interact.• Personal understanding of potential roles for parents were quite traditional, with

moderate support of school agendas and limited collaboration.• Parents knowledge was long term, individual, biased and familial while teacher

knowledge was professional, unbiased and based on experience with large number of children.

• Few parents were seen as likely to be uninvolved, primarily those who lacked the resources of time, money, or language.

• Respondents worried about two kinds of parents those who cared too much and asker for more attention than was equitable for their children those who cared too little, refusing to provide support.

• Prospective teacher were much more likely to do school based activities such as holding parent teacher conferences or calling home than they were to reach out into the community by holding out of school family get togethers or do some visits.

• Teacher attitudes are strongly related to teacher activity with families.

They concluded that prospective teachers come to their professional education with well-developed notions of the interactions that families should have with schools.

Their ascription of parent and teacher knowledge could be described as either complementary or conflicting with very little overlap for the two groups. Parent knowledge was long term, individual, biased and familial while teacher knowledge was professional, un-biased and based on experience with large number of children.

** what do we miss by giving lip service to parental roles in education but not working systematically to foster those roles in teacher education? Teachers are losing key opportunities for support, knowledge, and collaboration by holding parents at arms’ length.