Facilitator of Parent Workshops

My big leadership project was a series of parent workshops on the ELA Common Core Standards. My goals for the workshops were to educate parents and provide them with tools to assist their children as well as to improve parent engagement at my school.

Rationale and Purpose

My leadership project is a cycle of family workshops for grades 3rd-5^th. I chose this project because I am passionate about parent engagement and find it essential to students' success. Additionally, improving parent engagement was both a school and district goal. Therefore, I found it necessary to try and reach this goal. I am focusing on two problems for my project. The first problem I am trying to solve is to increase participation in parent workshops. Secondly, it is my goal that through the workshops parents will gain knowledge to support their children academically.

I currently work at William Green Elementary School in Lawndale Unified. My school is about 90% English Language Learners (ELL’s). At the start of the year, I observed a gap between the parents’ involvement in their children’s education. When I spoke to my parents at back to school night, they expressed a desire to learn more about what their children were learning. Ergo, the purpose of the family learning nights are to break down and teach the parents 3 over-arching English Language Arts Common Core Standards over a period of six months. The goals of the family learning nights are rooted in a belief that more engaged and better informed parents are crucial to student learning. The short-terms goals are to have more than 10% of the parents in grades 3-5 attend the workshops. The long term-goals are to have parents go home and utilize these skills from the workshop when assisting their child with homework. It is our hope that the nights will provide knowledge and help parents understand the new requirements that their children are facing. Another long term goal is the experience will give the parents a tool box of ideas they can use to assist their children with the new standards. Furthermore, the nights will offer the parents a chance to build their own academic knowledge. This project aims to improve the knowledge base for ELL students and their parents.

From the enormous amount of research I conducted, I learned that there are various root-causes as to why ELL parents do not attend parent workshops. In an article Parent’s Perceptions of Involvement in Children’s Education: Findings from a Qualitative Study of public Housing Residents by Yoder and Lopez 2013, found many root causes for the lack of attendance at parent workshops. The main factors that reoccurred as to why ELL parents did not attend workshops were: parents felt they lacked resources (transportation, technology, child-care, the fact they could not feed their children prior to the workshop) and/or knowledge (the ability to attend an academic night and feel that they could be successful among their more affluent parent counterparts). I attempted to address all these factors at my workshops to ensure attendance. I sent home material about the workshop beforehand in both English and Spanish to lower the anxiety level, we fed parents and children, children were able to attend the workshop therefore, child-care was not an issue and a majority of our parents live walking-distance from the school. Taking these factors into consideration helped me create a plan to meet the needs of my marginalized group.

Leadership Role:

I have created a well-rounded team that helped facilitate the success of the three workshops. The team consisted of the following: my Principal, Assistant Principal, Language Arts Specialist, Parent Liaison, and a 4th grade teacher. In addition, I had to work closely with the PTA to obtain funds to provide the parents with food and materials. I was able to create a positive relationship with the owner of the local Subway, Office Depot and pizza parlor. My principal is now able to use these places when needing to provide food or materials at workshops at a discounted price. I immensely enjoyed working with the Parent Liaison and community members. It allowed me to see the power of creating positive relationships within the community. It also benefited other teachers who were inspired by my workshop series and gave them the opportunity to use these businesses.

Reflection:

Data:

I feel one of the most useful tools I created for the three workshops were the surveys parents took which are shown below. My team and I went over the results and were happy with the outcomes. We saw items that we could adjust and made sure to do so in the final workshop. I am also going to use the evidence provided by the surveys at the School Site Council meeting to show that the funds we allocated to parent engagement is successful and should be continued for the 2015-2016 school year. On the survey from workshop 2, 100% of parent said they would attend a series of workshops again for the following school year. I feel this data will allow us to continue our mission to increase parent engagement at our school as well as in the district.

Workshop 1

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I faced a few challenges in my journey throughout the year. Workshop 1 on making inferences went extremely well. I feel it was more successful than the second workshop. I can recall two main barriers that I faced for this workshop. The first barrier was a mistake in how I wrote the invitations. I did not make it clear that parents should bring their children with them. Having their child completing the work with them makes the message more powerful. Mostly all the parents attended the workshops with their child. However, there were a few that were confused about the invitation. Therefore, I altered the invitation to make it clearer what exactly would occur at the workshop. My Principal and I received positive feedback on the updated invitation. The second barrier I faced for this workshop was the fact I had no assistance the day of setting up the workshop. I had to go through all the ipads by myself and set up the survey so it was easy for parents to access immediately. In addition, I made all the packets myself and set up the entire cafeteria. I realized this was a mistake as the leader of the committee. I should have asked for help and delegated responsibility. It was my team’s workshop and I want them to feel an ownership over the process.

Workshop 1 Survey Results:

Workshop 1 - Question 2

Workshop 1 - Question 3

Workshop 2

The second workshop on "Identifying The Main Idea" provided me with a few challenges. On a positive note we had a better turn out than the first. However, the amount of people who needed translation was a lot for my principal and Parent Liaison to handle. The first mistake I made was not properly separating the parents that needed translation from the parents who did not. In my first workshop, we had the parents who needed translation sit on the other side of the cafeteria which was successful because it did not interfere with my English speaking parents. However, this time the translation parents were placed behind the English only parents which was distracting at times.

Moreover, there were so many parents and I decided to not use a microphone because I did not need one the first time. This proved to be another mistake. I was talking loud and at times straining my voice to ensure parents were hearing me. Parents commented on the surveys that it would be better if I could use a microphone to make sure I was being heard. Therefore, in the third workshop I used a microphone. These were the barriers I faced in the second workshop.

Workshop 2 Survey Results:

Workshop 3

The final workshop was run a little differently because it focused on reading comprehension and writing strategies. There was a little less emphasis on the standards and more on the actual content. The parents learned how to UNRAAVEL a text with their students as well as how to use the National Writing Project’s warm-up writing strategy called, Power Writing. The barriers I faced during this workshop were time and translation. The content I had to model and allow the parents to try was time consuming, but I wanted to get to both strategies because I feel they are so important in building comprehension skills and writing fluency. In addition, they are also easy to implement and prove and continuously prove to be successful. I also had students model the UNRAVVEL song and dance. Parents loved this, but again it took time.

Based on the feedback from the surveys from the previous workshop, parents mentioned wanting to know if their answers were correct. Ergo, I included an answer sheet for the reading comprehension passages. Parents commented that they liked this addition to the packet. We also gave the parents gifts for attending the workshop. Everyone got a book, a compilation of non-fiction reading comprehension passages sorted by grade level and a writing journal so that they can try out the new strategies. These additions were successful.

Workshop 3 Survey Results:

Trials and Tribulations

The elements of the plan that appear to be working are the format of the workshops, the food, materials, and prizes given to the parents, the online resource page and modeling of that page, videos, the surveys, and the practice of having the student work alongside their parents and learn together. The elements of the plan that need improvement are a way to improve the translation portion of the workshop to ensure that all parents are receiving equal access to the material that is being presented. Additionally, we would like to purchase new speakers to ensure that the videos are being heard. If these two areas are improved,next year’s workshops will be even more successful.

I feel that we collected a lot of evidence that support both our short-term and long-term goals. In each of the workshops we met our goal of increasing parent attendance from 10% to 20%. We used the sign-in sheets to calculate these statistics and compared the results with last year’s attendance at various workshops. Our long-term goals we believe were met. By analyzing the surveys, parents claimed that they were or would use the skills at home to assist their children. We also heard from word of mouth that parents were using the skills and were pleased. This is why our attendance from workshop to workshop increased. I learned that putting together a successful series of parent workshops takes a lot of time, effort and advertising. As well as a dedicated team that is driven by the same goal.

There are a few factors that I have identified during implementation that needs to evolve to better assist my marginalized group of ELL’s. I want find a way to improve the translation and lower the anxiety level of my ELL parents. I want to ensure that the material being presented is too easy or too difficult. In follow-up surveys for the 2015-2016 school years I will add questions that address these issues.

CAPES Addressed:

This project helped form my identity as a leader. At the start of the project I was timid and felt nervous to run such an amazing team. I learned to ask for help and delegate responsibilities to help others take ownership of the process. I learned the importance of gathering data, analyzing that data and using it to improve. I feel all of these skills will benefit me in the future. I will ensure that all members of my staff feel empowered and all major discussions and decisions will stem from a collaborative process among all staff members. Furthermore, I see the benefits of working with communities members and parents to better the school and education for the children. I addressed many of the CAPES during this project. Such as CAPE 2 by sending out flyers to parents in both Spanish and English. I addressed CAPES 3, 7, 11 by proposing and presenting my ideas to both my team and School Site Council for approval. Moreover, I addressed CAPES 4, 7, 10, 13, 15 and 20 with the parent pre and post surveys. Finally I utilized CAPES 6 and 12 by analyzing the data and changing my plan accordingly. I am pleased with the amount of CAPES this project addressed.

Next Steps:

My next steps for the project is to present the results to School Site Council with the hope they will vote to allocate the same amount of Title I money to the parent workshops if not more. Next year I plan to transform the project by addressing other subject areas such as math and science as well as keeping ELA. I plan to have more teachers come aboard and assist with implementing the series of workshops within the above subject areas. Overall, I will continue to find ways to ensure that our ELL population is attending, learning and enjoying the workshops with their children. There is nothing more priceless than watching parents and students learning together!