Parents-teachers collaboration enhances students' growth
Published on: Monday, November 04, 2019
By: Anthea Peter
KOTA KINABALU: Home-School Collaboration (HSC), where parents and teachers mutually communicate regarding school and home affairs, is significantly instrumental in a student’s positive education growth.
Based on research, effective HSC leads to better outcomes for students, said Clinical Psychologist Dr Berney J Wilkinson.
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“HSC is the sharing of expectations and values. We can do that through written communication, parent-teacher conference, telephone communication, parent meetings or groups.
“We know that it is going to lead to better grades, better behaviour, increased graduation rates and overall better outcomes for students,” he said.
He said this in his talk on “Overcoming barriers to effective parent-teacher partnerships” during the Second International Conference on Psychology, Counselling and Education at Universiti Malaysia Sabah (UMS), here.
Dr Berney said a lack of home-school communication would cause students to have mismatched behaviours at school and home, due to conflicting sets of boundaries and rules in the two settings where the expectations of parents and teachers are not aligned.
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“By and large, we want to make sure there is a connection between the home and school.
“When students know that home and school is connected, they know that their behaviour in one setting is going to influence what happens in another setting,” he said.
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Elaborating further on HSC benefits, Dr Berney said HSC allows teachers to know what happens in the student’s home, hence enabling themselves to adjust academic expectations.
“For example, if the child’s parents are separated or planning a divorce, certainly that’s going to affect the child’s behaviour at school.
“But if the school has no idea what’s happening at home, they’re going to see those behaviours at school and interpret them as problematic.
“Maybe the child is not doing as much work as they were doing before, or they’re sort of more irritable and cranky, they (teachers) could interpret that as bad behaviour in school when actually that behaviour is reflecting something that’s happening at home,” he said.
Dr Berney added that HSC improves a student’s academic performance, as teachers would communicate to parents what is expected of the students, therefore enabling parents to jointly facilitate the child’s academic progress with the teachers.
However, he warned that one has to be cautious of the barriers to implementing HSC which interfere home-school communication.
“One (barrier) is simply poor communication…jargon and heavy-use of acronyms, which may make sense to the educators, but not to the parents.
“Another major barrier is the differences in expectations. Parents expect teachers to manage the students when the student is in school, so the parent will say ‘Well he’s at school, so he’s your problem’,” he said.
He added that teachers, parents and students all hold different values which could also hinder effective HSC.
“These differences in values that the teachers, parents and students hold, are all working for different things and moving towards different directions, so we need to align values.”
Dr Berney explained that to effectively implement HSC, schools need also to ensure that their alliance with parents are not limited to communicating negative issues.
“Parents know when the principal calls the home, it’s bad. Everyone knows for the most part that communication is negative. We don’t want that to happen because it’s certainly not going to foster home-school combination.
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