H4- Honor family/community involvement in the learning process

H4-Honor family/community involvement in the learning process. Teacher candidates inform, involve, and collaborate with families/neighborhoods, and communities in each student's educational process, including using information about student cultural identity, achievement and performance.  Parents have invested so much in their children, that it only makes sense for teachers to involve parents in the education of their students. In order to do this, communication must be established with parents. To illustrate the importance of parent communication, I drafted a letter (figure 1) to send home to parents introducing myself as the student teacher and asking for basic contact information so that I can be in contact with parents when I need to be. I included a section for parents to inform me of "things I need to be aware of" so that parents would see that I care about their student and hope to meet their individual needs.

[caption id="attachment_303" align="alignleft" width="353"] Figure 1. Parent letter explaining my role in their son or daughters' classroom.[/caption]

The parent letter I drafted is an example of H3 because by sending a letter home with my contact information and asking for parent contact information in return, I have effectively opened a line of communication with parents. I sent out the letter this week and have already received several back with some interesting comments about students. Comments I hope to be sensitive of, and will help tailor my teaching to specific student needs.

From this experience I learned that parent involvement is essential to understanding students holistically. If I had not sent the letter home, there would be important student details I would not otherwise know. The implications of a parent letter on student learningresults from the resources parents can be to teachers. Parents by definition know more about their son or daughter than anyone else. It only makes sense to use parents as a resource to serve students in the best possible way. In the future I hope to create a system in which to alert parents of the happenings in my classroom. This could be done by a weekly/monthly newsletter, a weekly/monthly e-mail or an open house night twice a semester. Each of these methods would involve parents in student learning.