Module 3 – Making a Plan

In the Reporting and Responsibilities lesson you learned about what and when you will be reporting on.

In this lesson you will learn:

• Tips on choosing what you will train parents on (Big Picture Topics)
• Why is family engagement our mission
• Vital Behaviors

The FIRST BIG ?

What does my director want me to work on?    This is a very important conversation to have with your director as a new parent mentor.

Below are some possible Big Picture Topics you and your director might discuss as areas where you can train parents and work with staff, students and families to improve these outcomes.

• Transition?

• Pre-K school transition and readiness?

• Improving Graduation Rates for Students with Disabilities?

• Improving Post Secondary Outcomes for students?

• Involving community partners?

• Creating opportunities for more authentic engagement?

One place to look is your system’s  most recent Parent Satisfaction Survey results and look for the areas where parents reported they were least satisfied.

There is a tab on the Learning Curve which offers information on results. Your director will also have this information:

Other measures of a school district’s progress can be found in the data collected by:

GOSA (Governor’s Office of Student Achievement)

CCRPI (College and Career Ready Performance Index)

Your district’s work on the Student Success Imagine the Possibilities (SSIP) Initiative and your district’s CLIP (Comprehensive Local Improvement Plan).

It is important to be familiar with these resources.

Let’s say you decided to work on Graduation Rates for Students with Disabilities.  The next thing you will need to do is determine what you will train parents to do to help improve those numbers.

Why are you going to train parents?

Because of research on student outcomes.

Research on dropout rates shows that parent involvement can impact a student’s decision to stay in school.  That research is the basis of  why we stress parent engagement as a means to improved student outcomes (our mission… get it?)

How this looks in practice:  Don’t worry if you don’t know what all these things mean yet.

OK, so how do I decide what to train on and how to find out if parents are learning or benefitting from the work that I am doing? Introducing the term “Vital Behaviors.”

Vital Behaviors relate to the parent engagement activities which parents practice on a regular basis. Like, checking to see if their child completed their homework and tracking that on a communication log.

The good news!  You don’t have to figure this all out by yourself. Go on to the next lesson to learn about Evidence to Practice Guides and Data Collection Tools.