Parent-Family Involvement

Dr. Joyce Epstein (Johns Hopkins University) has done landmark work in the area of parent and family involvement in children’s education. “There are many reasons for developing school, family, and community partnerships,” she writes. “The main reason to create such partnerships is to help all youngsters succeed in school and in later life.” [emphasis added]

Almost twenty years ago, when Epstein began to publish about her research, schools across the nation began to listen and re-evaluate how – or indeed, if – they interacted with parents. She provided a framework for schools to use in assessing the type and quality of interactions they had with parents. The Parent Involvement Framework defines six specific types of parent and family involvement.

• Parenting (help parents establish home environments to support students as learners)
• Communicating (design effective forms of school-to-home and home-to-school communications about school programs and children's progress) [And, I might add, “use them”]
• Volunteering (recruit and organize parent help and support)
• Learning at home (provide information and ideas to families about how to help students at home with homework and other curriculum-related activities, decisions, and planning)
• Decision-making (include parents in school decisions, developing parent leaders and representatives)
• Collaborating with community (Identify and integrate resources and services from the community to strengthen school programs, family practices, and student learning and development)

In addition to providing the framework for involvement, her work also acknowledges the challenges faced in each type of involvement and the impact of implementation on all parties: students, families, and teachers.

Questions to ponder:

How are parents and/or families most apt to be involved at your school?

How effective are the communication mechanisms in your school – and are they bi-directional or only from school to home?

Do you follow up when people volunteer? Do you let parents/families know specifically what types of assistance you can use?

Do you provide materials to use at home as a means of extending student learning and drawing parents closer? Does the material presuppose a certain education or background level? Is the tone condescending?

Are parents involved at key points in decision-making processes – or are they only involved at the end, after the decisions have already been made? Do you genuinely welcome input – or expect your oversight board to “rubber stamp” decisions?

Do you collaborate with your community – synagogue, movement, geographical region, issues-based interest groups? Do you encourage families to do so? Do you welcome the information that they bring to you?

In summary, I can’t help but wonder how is it that secular schools find it easier to acknowledge the importance of family involvement as an indicator of educational success than many of our supplemental schools do?

Jewish Parents

Two words which often strike fear into the heart of Jewish educators.

“Jewish parents.”

If you ask a group of teachers what comes to mind when you say, “Jewish parents,” these are some of their responses: “Pushy” … “Arrogant” … “Uninvolved” … “Don’t care” … “Sense of entitlement” … “Irresponsible” …”Don’t discipline their kids”

Teachers-who-are-parents are often as harsh in their comments as non-parent-teachers.

When did parents become the enemy? And who benefits when we keep categorizing them as the enemy?

Joel Grishaver takes a long, thoughtful look at parent-teacher relationships in his 1997 Jewish Parents: A Teacher’s Guide. He reminds us that most Jewish adults stopped their Jewish education after bar or bat mitzvah. He says that when they look at us, Jewish educators, they come face-to-face with three things:

1. Their own ambivalent or even bad memories of Jewish schooling…
2. Their own sense of Jewish inadequacy.
3. Their embarrassment over their children’s forthcoming Hebrew School failure (for which they feel ultimately responsible).(pp 20-21)

No wonder it’s so difficult to communicate with our students’ parents! When you add that to the likelihood that the reason we’re probably contacting them in the first place has to do with a problem (behavior, attendance, academic difficulties), the hostility we often encounter makes sense.

Here’s something to think about: How often do we pull a parent aside to tell them something we appreciate about their child? About a kind thing we overheard their child say? About a great point the kid made in class?

Grishaver goes on to ask,

“So here is the question (again): Why would a generation of Jewish kids who hated Hebrew School and who swore that when they grew up they would never subject their own children to the same kind of torture, become parents of the kids who now claim to be suffering in our classrooms?

The answer in one word: “ambivalence.” Ambivalence does NOT mean not caring. Ambivalence means feeing two different ways…. the truth is that most of the parents we work with do care a lot, but they care in different ways than we [emphasis added] want.” (p 23)

To summarize the rest of the section, this is how Grishaver articulates what parents want and don’t want.

They want their kids to

• have a sense of Jewish history, culture and values as one piece of their identity;
• feel good about being Jewish; and
• their kid to be regarded as authentically Jewish, so they can call upon their Judaism when they need it.

They don’t want to 1) have to force their kids to be Jewish; and 2) be embarrassed by their own Jewish inadequacies.

Many parents, Grishaver adds, have three additional desires of which they may not even be fully aware:

1. They want their Jewish past healed.
2. They want a family bond which can keep their family together and provide stability.
3. They want to belong.

That's a lot to think about.

Putting It All Together....

So, we've got 1) looking for the positive in each kid and 2) owning responsibility for the classroom climate and weather. Doesn't that cover it all?

It's a good beginning....

One of the things I wished I'd given more thought to in my early days of teaching is my philosophy about kids. I spent a lot of time on lesson plans, classroom activities, newsletters home to parents (pre-email days!), record-keeping and collecting tzedakah.

I spent almost no time thinking about kids: how I felt about them, what I expected from them, how to build relationships with them, what kind of a community I wanted my classroom to be. In those days, I thought that all I was responsible for teaching was content.

Boy, was I wrong!

Content is an important part of Judaic education, to be sure. But it's not the be-all and the end-all. To quote Abraham Joshua Heschel: “We have to have more than textbooks, we need text-people.”

What I do now, when I begin a class, is deliberately remind myself how I think about kids. Here's what I've finally come up with, after all these years:

• I like kids
• I expect kids will be kids, not little grown ups
• I don't think kids get up in the morning and think, "Oh, boy, I get to see Morah Mary today. I wonder how many ways I can push her buttons?"
• I think kids learn different ways.
• I think kids show you what they've learned in different ways.
• I think kids want the grownups in their lives to like them.
• I think kids want, need and deserve respect.
• I think kids want to be heard.
• I think (often) that kids have as much to teach me as I have to teach them...and sometimes more!

What other core beliefs do I have regarding kids?

• To quote Rick Lavoie, "A kid would rather look bad than dumb."
• There's no wrong answer when I ask, "What do you think?"
• Sometimes the answer I get that I'm not expecting is much more insightful than the answer I thought I should get.
• A kid might not remember what I taught, but s/he will remember how they felt in my class.
• I need to remember at all times that I'm the grownup in the room -- and need to model "grownup behavior."

And, ultimately: a classroom needs to be a safe place for everyone - students, madrichim /aides, and teachers.

I've decided I want to be one of Heschel's text people.

Classroom Weather

About five or six years after I began teaching, someone shared the following quote from Haim Ginott with me:

“I have come to a frightening conclusion. I am the decisive element in my classroom. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. As a teacher, I possess tremendous power to make a child’s life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated, and a child humanized or de-humanized.”

By that time I already understood that my students were apt to be more cooperative if I identified something I liked about them and focused on trait instead of on the behaviors that made me nuts.

But Ginott upped the ante – and laid the responsibility for classroom dynamics squarely on my shoulders.

At about the same time, my mother-in-law gave me a T-shirt that we both found hilarious. It read simply: “When Mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.”

My kids gleefully affirmed it: “Yeah, when she’s in a bad mood, we suffer.”

Ginott puts the same theory into educationalese and provides graphic examples of the “ain’t happy” part.

The T-shirt is long gone, but the quote has remained above my desk ever since. As teachers, the responsibility for the classroom weather is ours.

Did You Really Mean It?

The first couple of years I was teaching, it seemed that all I could do was keep my head above water from week to week. I poured over teacher guides for text books, ran to our central agency for information and worksheets, plotted my two hour class time down to nth degree, made extensive notes so I wouldn’t forget a single thing, packed my school bag, and did it all over again!

Fortunately, in those early years, I had very small classes and things went fairly smoothly.

By my third or fourth year, my classes were getting bigger as the synagogue and school were growing. And, as always happens, things – relationships – became more complex.

One year, my class and I just seemed to start off on the wrong foot. It was more kids than I’d ever taught before – I think we were up to twelve at that point. Some of the kids had special needs. Some of them were children of prominent members of the community. And – horror of horrors! – some of them were more interested in what their friend had to say than what I had to say!

I came home that first week almost in tears, and began complaining to my husband, son and daughter what a rotten class I’d gotten that year. They listened (or actually, probably didn’t listen) as I ranted and raved. Finally, my daughter looked up at me and said firmly, “Mom.”

“What?” I muttered, mumbling something unkind under my breath.

“Mom,” she said again firmly.

I looked at her. “What?”

“You know how you always say that there’s some good in everybody?”

“Yeah,” I responded suspiciously.

“Well, I want you to tell me one good thing about each of your students.”

I tried to laugh her off, but she was fixed on her goal. “Did you really mean it when you said everyone has something good in them?” she pushed, “or were you just saying that?” (I swear I heard someone whisper: “Busted.”)

To make a long story short, I was able to come with “something good” about all of the kids – except two. Then Miss Put-Your-Money-Where-Your-Mouth-Is gave me my assignment for the week: “Next week when you come home from school I want you to tell me something good about those two kids, too.”

And darned if that wasn’t the first thing she asked when I got home from school the following week.

A funny thing happened after that. As I began to look for something positive in each of my students, they became less obnoxious, more interesting, and more interested.

We ended up having a good year, that year – my kids and I. Thanks to someone who believed in making an honest teacher out of me.

Scope and Sequence

Here's the Scope and Sequence I designed for our hypothetical school, based on the Mission Statement in my preceding post.

Grade - K/1 (Yr A) [Note: Since this is a combined class, there needs to be a Year A and a Year B, so that students don't repeat exactly the same information each year]

• Text - Creation to Joseph (Let's Discover the Bible, Set 1)
• Holidays & Values - Let's Discover the Holidays
• Spirituality - Let's Discover God
• Hebrew - Oral Hebrew Language, focus on Family, School, & Body words
• Israel - Places in Israel

Grade - K/1 (Yr B)

• Text - Moses through Writings (Let's Discover the Bible, Set 2)
• Holidays & Values - Let's Discover Shabbat; Whole School materials: Symbols
• Hebrew - Oral Hebrew Language, focus on Colors, Numbers, Holiday words
• Israel - Our Jerusalem
• Jewish Experiences - Let's Discover the Synagogue

Grade - 2

• Text - Creation, Noah
• Holidays & Values - Let's Celebrate the Holidays; BJL Values
• Spirituality - BJL God
• Hebrew - Oral Hebrew Language, focus on Holdays, animals, home, weather; incorporate easy sentences
• Jewish Experiences - Let's Explore Being Jewish

Grade - 3

• Text - Lech Lecha, Joseph
• Holidays & Values - Rosh Hashanah & Yom Kippur
• Spirituality - I Have Some Questions About God
• Hebrew - Z'man Likro
• Israel - The Great Israel Scavenger Hunt

Grade - 4

• Text - Being Torah
• Holidays & Values - Chanukah & Purim
• Spirituality - Partners with God
• Hebrew - Hineini 1
• Jewish Experiences - The Life Cycle Journey

Grade - 5

• Text - Exodus
• Holidays & Values - Sukkot, Pesach, Yom Ha'Atzmaut
• Hebrew - Hineini 2
• Israel - Artzeinu
• Jewish Experiences - Out of Spain: Celebrating Sephardic Culture

Grade - 6

• Text - A Topical Bible
• Holidays & Values - Simchat Torah
• Hebrew - Hineini 3
• Jewish Experiences - Challenge & Change, Vol 3

Grade - 7

• Text - Think Prophets
• Holidays & Values - Rediscovering the Jewish Holidays
• Israel - History of Israel; Matsav
• Jewish Experiences - Klal Yisrael

Grade 8 - Judaism & Human History

Grade 9 - Why Be Different?

Grade 10 - Apples and Oranges

Grades 11/12 - Hot Topics

Initially, one of the parameters for this hypothetical school was that it would meet two hours a week. After looking at the Mission Statement, the materials available, etc., I arbitrarily decided to have K-7 meet 2.5 hours a week. That decision would never be made so quickly or easily in real life ::grin:: but, hey -- this is a "hypothetical school" and it made things much easier for the purposes of this training exercise.

If you'll compare the curricular materials to the Mission Statement, you'll see that it's a pretty good match. The one topic area covered (actually quite extensively, given the amount of time available for study) not mentioned specifically in that document is the area of Israel. Nominally, at the very least, it could be encompassed in the "social studies" aspect of the curriculum. I've chosen to separate it out because I think an understanding and awareness of Israel is a key component in helping our young men and women understand World Jewry of today.

In our lab session of our Teaching Teachers class, we'll work with the materials from grades K/1 (Yr A), grade 4 and grade 7. That will provide the developmental span I'd like the participants to experience. This Scope and Sequence will enable participants to see how the materials they'll be working with fit into the "big picture."

[NOTE: In "real life," depending on your minhag hamakom / the custom of the place, the educational leader might pass a new curriculum by the lay board charged with oversight for the religious school. I always did: I found it gave me practice explaining why I had made the choices I made, and it enabled the board to speak more knowledgeably about our program.]

Mission Statement

A Mission Statement ideally sets forth the vision that a school has for itself. Generally, it’s written by lay leaders of a school/congregation (often with professional input). It should be reviewed periodically to determine that the vision, as expressed, is still accurate.

Here’s one that I particularly like – from a community I used to work with:

The mission of the Religious School is to teach and promote living Judaism – from a perspective of Reconstructionist thought and practice – as the way to create personal, communal and ecological tikkun. All Religious School programs are designed to accomplish two goals:

• To foster Jewish literacy, including the following components –
  *Values & concepts
  *Texts – Tanach
  *History – Experience of the Jewish People
  *Hebrew (i.e., language)
  
• To engender an appreciation for Jewish living, including the following aspects:
  *Spirituality
  *Rituals & their meaning
  *Ethics (Tikkun)

Note that we are not claiming to foster a commitment to Jewish living, though this is indeed our hope. Though we feel our program will make this more likely, it is the actions of home, synagogue, and community interacting with school that will be the ultimate determinant of commitment.

This Mission Statement was written for a school that met the following hours: 2 hrs per week for K-2; 4 hours per week for grades 3-6; 3.45 hours per week for grade 7; and 1.45 hours per week for grades 8-12. They also had a HomeSchool component for families who were unable to participate in the midweek program for whatever reason.

It articulates several points very clearly – life skills are important; so is the identification with a particular Jewish movement. It’s reasonable to assume that the components of Jewish literacy that this community wishes to focus on are listed in order of importance. The aspects of Jewish life to focus on are spirituality, rituals AND meaning, and ethics. Tikkun /Repair is mentioned twice in the statement, so one can assume that social action could be a key component as well.

The final statement is perhaps the most interesting. The Statement acknowledges that the ultimate determining factor of commitment to a Jewish life style depends on “home, synagogue, and community interacting with the school.” The school doesn’t carry the burden alone. It may well be that this value helped determine the success of the HomeSchool program – parents teaching children within the parameters of the school-designed program worked remarkably well for about 25% of the student body.

With this Mission Statement in place, I would design a curriculum that has a heavy emphasis on values and text, followed by a “social studies” component which includes Jewish history and experiences as part of klal Israel / the Jewish people. Less emphasis would be placed on Hebrew language.

As it happened, this particular school ended up with two discrete segments: the Sunday program, which encompassed more traditional topics taught in a more traditional way; and the Midweek Program, which focused on Hebrew review and a Chuggim/ Clubs Program. The Chuggim program taught values through art, music and movement, drama, creative writing, and cooking.

The Mission Statement is the starting point for serious work with curriculum. All other decisions – content, emphasis within content area, methodology – are shaped by what the school articulates as its vision.

This will be the Mission Statement for the hypothetical school I’ll have my Teacher Training participants “work with” in the lab section of our classes.