Essentially, parent engagement is parents and teachers sharing responsibility to help their kids learn and achieve educational goals. Parental engagement takes place when teachers involve the parents in school meetings events, etc - and parents volunteer their support at home and school. 

When parents and teachers collaborate to build a thriving classroom, the effect on the students in that class can be quite dramatic. Students with engaged parents don’t just have high test scores: their attendance, self-esteem, and graduation rate rise, too.  It's hard to overstate the importance of parent involvement in education. According to the National Coalition for Parent Involvement in education, regardless of their income or background, students with more involved parents are significantly more likely to have better grades, attend school regularly, and show improved behavior at school.

Unfortunately at some schools, there are still teachers who think "If the families would just do their job, we could do our job." Unfortunately, there are still families who say, "this has nothing to do with me; it is your job to educate my kids." The key to fostering parental engagement is open communication between teachers and parents.

Joyce L. Epstein, in a 1995 book called School, Family, and Community Partnerships, argued that family, school, and community are all important "spheres of influence" on child's development and that their educational development is increased significantly when these three "spheres" work together. Epstein advocated for schools to proactively create an intentional overlap between these spheres of influence to create more synergy in the educational process.

Communication apps like Bloomz keep all these separate worlds connected, helping to facilitate communication between the district, the schools, the parents, and the students themselves. Bloomz allows you to create & schedule student-specific notifications to be automatically sent on recurring intervals for attendance, grades, and more allowing parents to quickly correct, or seek guidance on problems as soon as they develop - and also allowing parents to strengthen family connections with direct messaging, photo, video, or document sharing, and reward and track interactions in classrooms or anywhere in the school. Administrators with Bloomz can allow teachers to capture behavior data for any student (not just those in their own classroom), and also track the customizable locations where the interaction was observed.

By unifying all of your communication with Bloomz, you can unify the spheres of influence in students' lives, and more effectively push students in a positive direction. To learn more about how Bloomz can help your district, teachers and students, schedule a demo today.

Sources:

1.) National Coalition for Parent Involvement in education. 2006. Research Review and Resources. Retrieved September 16, 2011

2.) Henderson, A.T., and K.L. Mapp. 2002. A New Wave of Evidence: The Impact of School, Family, and Community Connections on Student Achievement. National Center for Family and Community Connections with Schools, Southwest Educational Development Laboratory.

3.) Joyce L. Epstein - School, Family, and Community Partnerships, 1995