5 Strategies That Strengthen School-Home Collaboration

Teachers and parents understand the importance of collaboration between school and family, and parental cooperation is a major factor in a child's success at school. But in reality, many teachers struggle to establish relationships with students' families; despite holding parent-teacher councils and organizing meetings with them, they still feel that a gap exists between them and parents.

But what if our focus were on social and emotional learning (SEL) as a way to bring teachers and families together, rather than focusing on holding meetings, councils, and other traditional methods of collaboration?

All of us—families and educators—share the goal of learning. Teachers and parents have multiple learning opportunities to explore and understand students' temperaments, and to understand them cognitively, physically, socially, and emotionally, as well as how this learning can be supported and enhanced.

While teachers possess broad professional knowledge of content and teaching methods, parents possess deep knowledge of their families, their environments, and the nature of their children. Everyone involved needs to participate in fostering the most vital life skills: social and emotional skills. There is an opportunity for us to learn strategies from one another that support student development.

Here are 5 tips for using social and emotional learning (SEL) strategies to strengthen school-home collaboration:

1. Supportive and Shared Leadership

What does shared leadership mean in terms of creating a school community invested in students' social and emotional development? It might mean that the leadership hierarchy found in schools—principals at the top of the building, then assistant teachers...—is not as important as collaborative relationships that can take part in creating a shared vision.

The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) encourages schools to form an SEL leadership team to ask questions such as: How can our school feel like a safe, connected community? How can meetings be held at times and places that motivate families to participate and share their valuable insights? Consider a meeting hall or any public space that might encourage parents and service providers to participate, try having older siblings care for their younger brothers and sisters, and during the meeting, use SEL tools such as cooperative family games or listening exercises that promote perspective-taking.

2. Collective Creativity

How can we benefit from the expertise of students' parents? It can be as simple as sending a brief questionnaire and asking a few questions. In addition to parents' expertise in their children and family cultures, many may alert us to skills through their professional experiences or personal interests that could be a valuable resource for improvement.

It is also essential to adopt approaches that encourage people to discuss so that all parties can genuinely contribute to a larger vision for learning. When the task of creating a connected school community is placed solely on principals and teachers, the task becomes too large; but when parents feel they can contribute their voices, opinions, and energy, principals and teachers will be surprised by how much can be accomplished.

Possess social and emotional learning skills to use while communicating, listening, and collaborating with parents, such as: setting learning agreements, having deep conversations, and learning how to express dissenting opinions constructively.

3. Shared Values and Vision

With the start of each new school year, there is a new opportunity to look back on the past year to learn from it, adding your vision for how to provide the best education for students. I worked at a school that cared about the hopes and goals of all stakeholders—students, teachers, parents, and even drivers and volunteers. But how can we look at personal hopes and goals as a metric of success?

Use SEL tools to have a conversation about hopes and goals for the school year, and how they can be achieved by working together. Incorporate rules (dos and don'ts) into SEL programs derived from those hopes and goals, brainstorm a way you can discuss school rules and family rules, find similarities and differences, and see how everyone can work to understand differences and support and reinforce common ground.

4. Supportive People and Environmental Conditions

Trust is the foundation upon which any partnership is built. In order to form a good relationship between teachers and parents, we need to communicate with them multiple times throughout the year—not just once or twice. It can be practical and good to think about communication methods; they do not need to be long and complicated, but if a teacher feels responsible for continuous communication with parents, the task will become a burden on them.

What if everyone were responsible for keeping communication ongoing on a monthly basis? It could happen when parents stop by upon arriving at school, or during swim practice or football practice. These small conversations may seem insignificant, but in reality they go a long way toward building trust and collaboration between school and home.

5. Shared Personal Practice

Every individual—parent, teacher, and principal—must participate in their own learning and be willing to share and discuss their experiences, mistakes, successes, and failures in order to grow individually and collectively. This means there are many opportunities to build trust, build a sense of caring, and build a sense of collaboration.

How can SEL practices be used to set a positive, measurable goal to try something new? Share this goal with parents and teachers, then reflect on how things went—the strengths to build upon and the points that need to change.

If we improve our ability to teach and learn by focusing on relationships, we must examine how to give parents and family members the opportunity to be a vital part of this relationship. It may require some reflection and a new set of expectations, but the rewards will be substantial. Students will receive the strongest possible form of social and emotional learning by seeing those around them model collaboration and effective communication.

At Ynmo, we believe in the importance of social and emotional learning, and we encourage school-home collaboration. Responses to behavioral therapies improve when they take place in an environment that is more familiar to the child, such as their bedroom, their playroom, or alongside those they love. Therefore, we worked on developing the Family App, which enhances collaboration between the practitioner and parents, enabling parents to view their child's profile, plans, assessments, and periodic reports after each session with the practitioner, making it clear to parents how the child's responses were. Practitioners assign some tasks to parents if needed, and it is used for instant messaging between practitioners and parents, whether written, voice, or by sending photos

and video clips for inquiries and follow-ups. In this way, parents are kept constantly informed of their child's progress, which strengthens the partnership between parents and teachers in the educational process.

Adapted translation

.https://www.rethinked.com/blog/2019/09/12/5-sel-strategies-that-strengthen-school-to-home-collaborations/

Originally published in Arabic. This English version was produced with AI-assisted translation; the Arabic original remains the reference.