Parent Engagement

Listen to what principals are saying about the Parent Engagement workshops from Strategic Learning Initiatives.

Parents

Parent Engagement

Parents are often over-looked but vitally important stakeholders in schools, particularly in underprivileged inner-city neighborhoods. Keying in on their importance in helping students and schools succeed, the SLI Parent Engagement Component focuses on teaching parents how to better support and be involved in their children's learning. The SLI model encourages parents to understand that home is a place of Learning and that parents have a vital role in helping their children be better prepared for school and become better learners.

SLI offers a series of workshops to parents in each school in our networks of neighborhood schools, helping them to learn strategies and methods to employ at home with their children. Parents are encouraged to model learning as a continuous process, which is crucial in fostering a life-long love of learning in their children. Ranging from reading and math games to nurturing positive self-esteem and helping with science projects and analytical thinking, the SLI workshops give parents useful and effective tools, strategies and activities which strengthen learning for the whole family.

In keeping with the SLI model for building long-term school capacity, SLI recruits and trains parents to lead the workshops and coordinate ongoing parent involvement after the four-year SLI network partnership ends. These trained parents carry on the lessons learned from SLI and enable the schools to continue engaging new families in supporting their children's learning.

Going beyond the workshops, SLI also engages parents in helping shape the learning environment of their children's schools. A parent coordinator ─ trained by SLI ─ joins the principal and teacher coordinator as the Leadership Team at each school. Together the Team works with SLI staff to build a shared vision of how to develop a culture of continuous improvement that includes all three stakeholder groups, parents, teachers and principals.