Educational Problems of Interest

There are many small problems in education that interest me - discipline, missing work, low grades, social behaviors, etc.  However, many of them seem to revert back to the one idea that I believe could solve many of them - parental involvement.  This is an important problem to me because I teach at a Title I school of just sixth graders and I already see parents becoming uninvolved in their child's education.  However, I'm not always convinced that the problem lies with the parents choosing to leave the child on his/her own, which is what I want to research.  This is a critical area because students can often go astray educationally and socially without proper parental guidance.

Let me set this situation up for you.  First of all, my campus is the child's first school away from elementary and I feel that there are quite a few parents that don't know how to be involved.  Also, I believe that students are learning, at this early age, how to keep information from their parents when they don't want them to know (either they don't want to do the work assigned or don't want to tell their parents information that could get them in trouble).  This is where I want to bridge the gap - I want to provide paths of learning for the parents to be able to understand what is happening from this point forward with their child's education.

I have the belief that this action research study would be beneficial in solving this problem because I have a strong faith in people.  I have a faith that people want the best for their children, we just have to provide them with a pathway to help that happen.  In my opinion, if we set the parent up now with being involved in the education at this level of schooling, they'll be knowledgable for the future and will, hopefully, continue to stay involved.  I want to have monthly parent meetings where the parents learn how to access their students grades from an online account, learn how to communicate with the teachers (set up an email account for them if needed), review important projects and their guidelines, and just simply show the parents what to expect of their child.  I know that we provide this to parents in the syllabus, but how many parents truly read all eight syllabi all the way through enough to understand what is going on all of the time?  This task, on top of filling out paperwork and signing papers, can be a lot for a parent at the beginning of the school year.  My hope is that grades, discipline, etc. will improve just based on the fact that an avenue of communication has been opened between the teacher/school and the parent.  I'm excited to see if this works.