Communicating with some parents seems to be much harder than you’d expect. You’d think we’d all know that we are on the same side and that we all have the child’s best interests at heart. You’d think that last would be a given. But no.
Our homework approach has been changed recently to reflect the principles of A Curriculum for Excellence, and to acknowledge the changing expectations of the future world our children will work, create and play in. Before we changed, we consulted parents and children, we looked at research and we developed the new approach to give parents more flexibility and opportunity to be as involved as they wished, and to give children more involvement in their own learning. More specifically, we have changed the approach to home learning in reading, spelling and maths.
We are giving the children more choice about the book they take to read at home, and giving the parents more choice about what they do with it at home eg parents now decide whether and how much their child is to write in a reading diary. The emphasis however is on reading for enjoyment, and extending the range of texts they choose.
Instead of dishing out weekly spelling words 10 at a time, we use the Highland Literacy approach and give parents all the words for the stage at the beginning of the session, with a list of websites and games they might like to play together to reinforce the words.
Instead of tedious and repetitive worksheets, we decided to collect a stock of appropriately levelled Maths games for children to play at home. (The preparation of this was expensive, time-consuming and labour intensive and could not be done by support staff as each game had to be evaluated for its suitability both in maths and in reading level for age and stage, and then bagged with labels and counters, dice, cards, etc. )
Our home links with topic work are often through personal projects on an aspect of the topic, and suggestions for local visits, websites and other links are included in PLPs.
When I was a parent of primary children, I would have been delighted with this approach, giving me much more flexibility and enjoyment in sharing learning with my children. I would have welcomed the removal of the pressure of artificial deadlines, and would have been pleased that my children’s teachers were spending more time teaching my children and less in preparation and marking of paper exercises of extremely dubious value.
But parents at my school? No. A vocal few want a return to the teacher setting the reading book and the number of pages to be read (“Because the children won’t do it unless the teacher has said they must.”) They want 10 spelling words issued on a Monday to be tested on Friday and the results posted on a noticeboard. (“So motivating”) They will accept Maths games as homework, so long as traditional worksheet homework is also supplied, set, marked and returned by the teacher. (“Lets parents know where the children are in their learning”) Oh, and a weekly report on each child’s progress…
We thought it would be good to have some information evenings to let parents know how we teach things these days. We thought we’d start with Maths – the teaching of which has probably changed most since these parents were at school themselves. We imagined an evening of 15-minute workshops on things such as place value, processes of addition, smartboard games, how we teach fractions - the things parents have told us at parents evenings that they would like to be better informed about.
So the self-selected subgroup of the parent council was asked to find out from parents what specific topics would be most helpful. Disappointingly, they seem to want “monitoring and assessment” and “how you stretch the most able and support the less able” - the sort of areas we’d expect HMIe with some professional knowledge to consider. It’s hard to see this as anything other than these parents’ distrust of our professionalism.
These are the parents who say things like “I want my daughter to know she can do anything she wants.” We nod. “If she wants to get to Cambridge she will have to be pushed.” We stop nodding. “It’s so important therefore for her to be given the structured homework that will ensure that she can achieve this.” Internally we shake our heads sadly, knowing that this 10-year old would be much better served by being taught some self-motivation, some social skills and given some opportunity to have fun – real fun, as opposed to scheduled activities.
As a result of this pressure, I have seen excellent teachers in our school questioning themselves, their effectiveness and their abilities. Some of the most committed and creative individuals I know have been needlessly pushed to the point of wondering if they are in the right job. We all know it’s good to question our practice, and are always open to the possibility of change as a result of our reflections. We constantly evaluate what we do, and have “I want to make a difference to each child” stamped to the core of what we are. With all our hearts, we would like each child to be given all of our time and focus, and for each lesson to go according to plan.
Working one to one, or in very small groups, at a time and in a place that is conducive to learning, (as parents have the opportunity to do with their children) would allow each child to make maximum progress of a sort. But the real world isn’t like that. Even if, usually, teaching time is protected, there will always be those days when we have to interrupt the teaching of our exciting and interactive lesson on remainders to explain briefly to Keira why it wasn’t nice or necessary to make Lee cry about the fact that his Dad’s now living with Danielle’s Mum and their new baby, and to ask Jordan to give Hannah’s new glitter pen back, (yes it is Hannah’s; yes, it really is; no that word isn’t acceptable in school, nor is throwing a pen at Hannah; yes you did, I saw you…) and to let the P7 eco reps talk to the class about what the theme will be at next month’s fundraiser. This is reality. It is not helpful to pretend it is otherwise, but it can make us feel guilty that we didn’t “get through” as much as we’d hoped, or don’t manage to give full attention to every one of the 30 children, every day.
And when faced with sometimes quite aggressively expressed negative comments from just a few parents, it can be hard to remember the many parents who said at parents evening how much they appreciate the skill and commitment of the teacher of their child and, since the new approach to home learning, how much more they are enjoying all aspects of their child’s learning, and how much more valued they feel as contributors to and partners in their children’s learning.
