Supporting Parents, Teachers, and Administrators with Remote Learning
So much is changing as we as a nation react and adapt to the COVID-19 quarantine. One major shift has occurred in education. Schools from elementary to post-secondary have closed their doors. Young children are learning from home. Parents are now tasked with facilitating their children’s education in all subjects, at all grade levels. Teachers and administrators are having to acclimate to an online curriculum, and to less interaction with their students.
Be Strong Families realizes that this is an enormous challenge—and a huge opportunity—and we want to assist. The big picture vision -is for parents, teachers, and administrators to be meaningfully engaged with each other, collaborating on the task of educating children. Educators have known for a long time that children perform better academically when their parents are engaged with their schooling, but, pre-pandemic, the primary teaching role clearly fell to the teachers. Teachers often didn't or couldn't prioritize relationships with parents, except perhaps in situations where a child was struggling. Now the script has flipped. With that comes urgency for school personnel to engage parents as full partners, working together. This is also the path to reducing stress and increasing effectiveness for all involved.
Luckily, parent engagement and building strong relationships between parents and professionals has been Be Strong Families' specialty since our founding in 2012. We were founded by a small group of parents who wanted to transform human services, including education, by living the principles of family support, infusing relationship-based practice, mobilizing mutual assistance at the community level, and strengthening families from the inside out. We are best known for Parent Cafes; a small group conversation process that encourages individual deep self-reflection, peer-to-peer learning, community-building, and resilience.
Recently we have collaborated with education professionals to design a suite of workshops to support parents, teachers, administrators, and children in the new educational landscape brought about by COVID-19.
The cornerstone of our offerings is Parent Cafés and Teachers' Cafés. These are places where peers come together in a safe space to be vulnerable, share frustrations and successful strategies, de-stress, problem-solve, and learn from and grow with each other. We are offering these online, hosted by our staff. We are also available to train school or district specific Café Teams on hosting on-line cafés.
We also acknowledge that what is sometimes needed is more and better information to add tools to the toolkit. So, for parents, we have designed teacher-guided courses that share their tips, tricks, and educational best practices. These workshops are designed to assist parents with feeling confident and competent in their enhanced role as their children's de facto primary teacher, and to assist them with delivering educational curricula on unfamiliar subjects. For teachers and administrators, we are offering professional development workshops that outline effective ways to foster educational alliances with parents. (For more details, click here)
In addition, when Be Strong Families developed our 2020-2025 Strategic Plan, we added youth as a primary focus. For the past nine months, we have been working with experts in STEAM education and Title 1 program development to design curricula with two-generation applications. It is especially difficult in these times for school districts to accommodate high quality arts education. Our Full STEAM Ahead and RISE Arts curricula can supplement schools' capacity to provide innovative and equitable instruction to low-income youth and their parents. This gives schools in under-resourced communities the opportunity to reap the well-researched benefits of arts education.
Remote learning may be seen mostly through a negative lens (as a loss, a problem, a challenge) but at Be Strong Families, we view all challenges as opportunities. By redefining and strengthening the relationships between parents, teachers, and administrators, we, as a society, have an opportunity to do what we've always intended and never quite gotten to. We can use this time to build strong educational alliances between teachers and parents, and to support the educational and emotional development for not just our children, but for all of us.
Learn more in the program brochure below (downloadable).
Article by: Katthe Wolf