The year before last, when I was teaching Grade 4, I got enormous pleasure from posting images and captions about what we’d been doing in class each week. I started the project in an attempt to reach out to parents and help them understand what their children are learning at school. As many of our parents do not speak English and/ or are working long hours, it can be hard to communicate what their children are learning. One of the biggest challenges I have faced at my school is knowing the changes and improvements we have made to the children’s learning experiences in the last 18 months, and yet having no way of communicating this to parents. Sometimes it is a language barrier, sometimes a lack of interest and nearly always a complete lack of being able to relate to an understanding of learning I have come to take for granted (active, student-centred, purposeful, scaffolded, progressive, cohesive, learning-outcomes driven). While many of our parents are far more educated than most of their generation in Cambodia, there still exists a massive gulf between what they experienced as education and what we are trying to achieve.
Lack of parental involvement is not unique to Cambodia, but what is one of the greatest challenges here is that when parents see an ‘international school’ on every street corner, how do you help parents understand the difference between good schooling and just schooling? When often parents are putting the majority of their monthly salaries into sending their children to private schools, how do you help them distinguish between schools that will focus on the development and well-being of their child and schools that will focus on the numbers on their registration forms?
It is a complex issue, which I am searching for a better understanding of. Despite emailing the link to my class webpage to parents regularly and encouraging pupils to guide their parents there, there was little interest from parents.
However, even if the only audience was my parents, I loved doing it. It documented what we were doing in class and helped me focus on the skills each activity was developing.
Lack of parental involvement is not unique to Cambodia, but what is one of the greatest challenges here is that when parents see an ‘international school’ on every street corner, how do you help parents understand the difference between good schooling and just schooling? When often parents are putting the majority of their monthly salaries into sending their children to private schools, how do you help them distinguish between schools that will focus on the development and well-being of their child and schools that will focus on the numbers on their registration forms?
It is a complex issue, which I am searching for a better understanding of. Despite emailing the link to my class webpage to parents regularly and encouraging pupils to guide their parents there, there was little interest from parents.
However, even if the only audience was my parents, I loved doing it. It documented what we were doing in class and helped me focus on the skills each activity was developing.