Collaboration:  The Next Frontier

Research-based strategies to unite families, schools, and communities for student success

 By Gord Kerr, M.Ed.

In the January 2006 issue of the School Advocate, Mary Lee Halverson wrote a well researched article entitled ‘Schools can’t do it alone.’  Raising children and preparing learners are connected and complex tasks that require collaboration between families, schools and community members.  However, collaboration is not easy.  Far too often, conflict occurs when these three diverse groups try to work together, despite having the common objective of helping children succeed. 

Effective collaboration between people with different backgrounds, experiences, education and specialties is a very difficult thing to achieve.  Teachers, parents, principals, coaches, and community group leaders all have different backgrounds, experiences and areas of specialty that sometimes make it difficult to work together towards a common goal.  Collaboration requires strong and skillful leadership that encourages participants to respect differing opinions and expertise and to enable people to come to agreement on a common course of action.  Collaboration also requires team participants to be willing to let go of personal biases and perspectives and be willing to serve the greater good by supporting a united group decision.  Much easier said than done.

Dr. Joyce Epstein, North America’s leading and most well-known researcher within this field, suggests that children are directly impacted by three overlapping spheres of influence – family, schools and communities. 

Each sphere has an area of specialty, but the influence on a child’s development overlaps.  Dr. Epstein contends that the three groups can improve the chances for student success by collaborating through a series of practical research-based strategies.  These are often referenced and sometimes broken into six or eight types of involvement.

Here are Dr. Epstein’s research-based strategies to unite families, schools and communities to work together for student success.

1. Communicating, ie. improve communications.  Good communications provide the foundation for effective collaboration.  With an awareness of what is happening and what is needed comes an understanding of how parents or teachers or community members might be able to better support the development of a child.  One topic of communications might be to encourage families to attend various school events or special events including concerts, sporting events or assemblies with their children.

2. Learning at home.  Enable parents to help children learn at home.  Parents can support student learning at home by supporting homework completion, good course selections, good choices in after-school activities and in many other ways.  However, parents sometimes need information, coaching and support to enable them to help their children at home.  Homework seminars, course selection nights, and clear homework expectations are just three examples.

3. Parenting.  Help parents build parenting skills.  Schools and community groups can both play a role in helping parents to understand and deal with the various phases of growth and development that children go through, and be prepared to deal with some of the tougher issues like bullying, drugs and peer pressure.

4. Volunteering.  Encourage volunteerism and manage volunteers well.  This includes designing meaningful roles for volunteers, providing training and feedback.  This also includes fundraising for a purpose, and managing the frequency of fundraising initiatives to avoid contributor burn-out.

5. Participating in decision-making.  Encourage and develop leadership through school councils or volunteer boards designed to help children succeed.  Develop goals, decision-making processes to enable people with diverse backgrounds to collaborate to help children succeed.

6. Collaborating with community.  Enable community groups to collaborate with schools and families to provide extended learning opportunities and activities for children.

There is plenty of research available to validate these six strategies as the keys to success in elevating rates of parental involvement and to use to enable families, schools and the community to work collaboratively for student success.  On Dr. Epstein’s website www.partnershipschools.org are examples of ‘promising practices.’  These are programs developed and used by other schools around North America that are available for use to any school leader interested in adopting them here in Ontario. 

There are also a series of examples of programs related to these strategies available here including research conducted here in Ontario to validate these strategies.

Schools can’t do it alone.  Neither can parents nor community members.  As difficult as it is to foster innovation and collaboration, research demonstrates that time and money invested in solutions that unite the efforts of families, schools and the community improves the potential for student success.  And in its broadest sense, isn’t that what the business of education is all about?

Gord Kerr recently completed a Master of Education at Nipissing University, where he focused on researching methods for advancing helpful parent and community involvement in education in Ontario.  He currently serves on Ontario’s Interim Parent Involvement Advisory Board along with other members of the Parent Voice in Education Project.  For more information, please visit www.schoolcouncils.net. © 2006 Ontario School Council Support Centre.

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Last modified: September 13, 2007