Effective parent engagement is a crucial component of early childhood education. It’s one way to ensure parental involvement in the classroom, which Sprig identified as one of the 15 essential terms in early childhood educational equity.
When parents are involved in their child’s education, they can help create a supportive learning environment that promotes academic success and social-emotional development.
However, finding ways to engage parents in their child’s education can be challenging, especially in a world where parents are busier than ever.
Sprig Learning presents these 6 effective parent engagement ideas that can help schools and teachers build strong partnerships with parents, support their child’s learning, and ultimately improve outcomes in early education.
Many parents only hear from their school when there’s a problem or concern with their child. By changing the conversation and sending home positive feedback early in the school year, parents are more enthused to be involved in their child’s education. They can see that engaging with their child’s school doesn’t always mean a trip to the principal’s office.
A quick email, note, or message that recognizes a student’s progress, achievement, or positive behavior can make a big difference in building a strong partnership with parents and caregivers.
Positive reinforcement isn’t just for your students – it’s a powerful tool for engaging and motivating parents too.
Effective parent engagement requires sensitivity and respect for the cultural backgrounds of diverse students and families.
To create a supportive and inclusive learning environment, it’s important to plan events and activities that are culturally relevant and respectful, and to communicate with families in a way that values their perspectives and experiences as the first teachers of their children.
When engaging with parents, it’s important to actively listen and respond to their needs, concerns, and feedback. By building a relationship of trust and respect, parents feel heard, supported, and understood. It strengthens the partnership between home and school.
As classrooms become more diverse, it’s essential to prioritize cultural responsiveness and engagement to help all students thrive.
Collaboration between parents and teachers is critical to supporting children’s learning and development. To foster a strong and healthy parent-teacher relationship, it’s important to establish a sense of mutual support and encourage parents to take an active role in their child’s education.
It’s so important in fact, that Sprig listed partnering with parents as one of the four golden rules of early literacy development.
By including parents in classroom activities, inviting them to share their experiences, and providing regular updates on their child’s progress, parents feel valued and engaged in their child’s learning journey. When they feel welcome and appreciated in the classroom, they are more likely to be enthusiastic partners and advocates for their child’s education.
Emphasizing the importance of parent-teacher collaboration can have a significant impact on student success and create a more positive and supportive school culture.
Technology has transformed the way parents and caregivers stay connected to their child’s education. To effectively engage with parents, it’s important to leverage the power of digital communication and provide multiple ways for parents to stay informed and involved.
Whether through email, text message, social media, or educational apps and software, teachers can communicate more easily and frequently with parents, sharing updates on student progress, upcoming events, and classroom news.
By meeting parents where they are and using the communication channels they prefer, teachers can create a more convenient and responsive experience for families, and foster a stronger sense of partnership and engagement.
Embracing technology as a tool for parent engagement can help bridge the gap between home and school, and ultimately lead to better outcomes for students.
Meaningful parent engagement involves empowering parents with the tools and resources they need to support their child’s learning journey at home.
By providing parents with guidance, understanding, and fun learning activities for home, teachers can create opportunities for parents to reinforce learning beyond the classroom. This can take many forms, such as providing digital tools like Sprig Library or sending home printouts and activity sheets in a backpack.
The more parents are equipped with the tools and resources they need to support their child’s learning, the more invested they will be in their child’s education.
By fostering a collaborative and supportive relationship with parents, teachers can help families feel more connected to their child’s school experience.
When it comes to parental engagement, the simplest approach is often the most effective. Encouraging fun, creativity, and open-mindedness can help parents and families feel more invested in their child’s education and more connected to the school community.
By providing opportunities for parents to come together and have fun, such as in summer learning programs for example, teachers can create a sense of camaraderie and build a positive and supportive school culture.
The key is to establish an open and relaxed pathway for communication between the school and home. This can include regular check-ins, parent-teacher conferences, newsletters, and other forms of outreach that keep parents informed and engaged.
By creating a culture of collaboration and openness, teachers can foster strong relationships with families and help create a more successful learning experience for students.
In conclusion, engaging parents in the early years creates a successful and positive learning environment for young children. By using simple yet effective strategies such as positive reinforcement, cultural sensitivity, technology tools, collaboration, and fun, teachers can encourage parents to take an active role in their child’s education.
Providing parents with the tools they need to support learning in the home and establishing open and relaxed channels of communication can help build strong relationships between the home and school.
By working together, parents and teachers can create a more meaningful and impactful educational experience for children in their early years.
Oral language forms the bedrock of early literacy.
It is one of the greatest predictors of a child’s success in school.
Oral language development plays a critical role in early literacy because it provides the foundation for reading and writing.
As children acquire more words and learn to use them in meaningful ways, they are better able to understand and use written language.
Beyond the foundational role of oral language, early language skills are in fact predictive of later reading comprehension development.
Grade 5 students with poor reading comprehension despite adequate word-reading skills – showed weak language skills as early as 15 months of age.
Studies show that children with unresolved specific language impairment in kindergarten are at a higher risk for reading difficulties, particularly in phonological processing and reading comprehension.
Given the crucial stature of phonological awareness and reading comprehension in evidence-based literacy, mastering oral language early on is key to reading successfully!
Babies begin to acquire language within months of being born and by age five, they can master basic sound system structures and grammar.
Young children develop their oral language skills through conversations with their caregivers, exposure to a rich vocabulary, and opportunities to practice their language in different contexts.
Thus, for the acquisition of oral language, It’s important to provide high-quality early learning experiences which contain such interactions, exposure and opportunities to practice.
Oral Language is a skill practiced all the time with teachers, educators, parents, peers and members of the community. If well-supported properly, it encourages reading and writing.
Thus, there also needs to be a high-level of parental involvement and community participation, where adults in the child’s life are taking the time to speak to them and encouraging them to speak also.
Cultural relevance can make a huge difference in strengthening early learning, especially in how it promotes oral language acquisition. Culturally responsive content helps students to see themselves in what they are learning. Connecting with words and concepts is easier, and learning is more fluid.
Having understood the need for oral language in early literacy and its acquisition process, how do the aforementioned practices translate into practice?
Since few children entering kindergarten can read words, early literacy programs should look at oral language skills that develop word recognition and/or decoding ability.
When taught in combination with language comprehension, concepts such as communication and vocabulary leads to reading comprehension.
Thus, whether it’s a program for preschool, kindergarten, or the early elementary grades, it is very important that early literacy programs teach both word recognition and language comprehension.
Besides the actual teaching content focusing on oral language, the following considerations should also be made for maximizing oral language growth.
Early learners should be exposed to oral language activities holistically, in all aspects of life.
It’s important that an early literacy program engages caregivers as well. Students that have caregivers actively engaged in their learning do better in overall educational outcomes, grades and academic achievement.
Holistic learning is a large topic which Sprig has covered previously in multiple blog posts. It should be used in early literacy where a child has more than one person to practice oral language skills with, and more than one environment where such practice can take place.
Assessments of oral language skills are important to identify children who are likely to need more intensive instruction to achieve reading success.
By identifying and working with students across all literacy levels early, educators can be proactive in ensuring that students meet or exceed academic expectations.
Early and frequent assessment of children’s oral language abilities provides educators and caregivers with a clearer picture of student learning.
Holistic learning also plays an important role in early assessments of skills which digs deep into each student’s needs, strengths and interests.
Such assessments conducted regularly early on as these traits are being formed, are called formative assessments. It’s another topic that is covered extensively by Sprig. Holistic formative assessments are great for assessing oral language skills early and frequently.
Oral language is paramount for early literacy, not just on its own accord, but because it has such strong ties to other foundational reading skills that result in reading proficiency.
For example,
Children learn to recognize and manipulate speech sounds through activities such as rhyming and segmenting words into individual sounds.
This is phonological awareness, and its development can be encouraged by teachers by encouraging children to play with sounds in oral language.
Also, children develop comprehension skills through conversations, discussions, and storytelling, where they learn to understand and interpret the meaning of oral language.
Teachers can support reading comprehension development by asking open-ended questions about the text and encouraging children to make predictions about what will happen next.
These language comprehension skills come in very handy for reading comprehension.
Similarly for vocabulary acquisition, children build their vocabulary knowledge by being exposed to a variety of words and phrases in different contexts in oral language.
Teachers can support vocabulary acquisition by using rich and varied language in their own speech and reading aloud high-quality books that use sophisticated vocabulary.
Children who have strong oral language skills are more likely to develop strong reading and writing skills, while children who struggle with oral language development may experience difficulties with literacy.
Therefore, it is important to provide young children with rich language experiences and opportunities to develop their oral language skills to support their early literacy development.
Oral language development is an ongoing process that occurs over time, and it is best supported through a combination of explicit teaching, rich language experiences, and opportunities for children to engage in meaningful conversations and interactions.
Sprig Learning offers two solutions that deal with oral language development.
Sprig Language does a deep dive on the fundamentals of oral language for Pre-K to Kindergarten students, working on things such as pragmatics and syntax.
Sprig Reading also covers the fundamentals of oral language, but dovetails this one component of early learning with other foundational reading skills that are needed to turn a child into a confident and proficient reader by Grade 3.
Teacher
But while we know that relational trust between schools and parents is linked to higher levels of student achievement, how much time are we as educators dedicating to actively nurturing our relationships with parents and caregivers? How can we create a welcoming and responsive classroom culture, one where engagement is initiated and led by parents, caregivers and community members? And what does parent engagement look like in the culturally responsive classroom, particularly in communities where trust in the education system is lacking, oftentimes because of historical trauma?
We tend to evaluate parent engagement by the number of parents who attend parent-teacher interviews, or how regularly we communicate directly with the home. These numbers, although important, are often more representative of a parents’ busy schedule than their meaningful engagement with their child’s education.
Because we lack the framework and tools we need to discuss and describe parental engagement, we as teachers often find ourselves unable to analyze and assess the true fruits of our efforts. We know that we are doing “something” to get parents engaged in our classrooms—but is it enough?
Ken Leithwood argues that we need to shift away from the current model of trying to get parents into the school, and towards a model where parents and caregivers can support learning in the home. After all, this is where half of the learning that we are responsible for as educators happens.
Roger Hart (1992) developed the Ladder of Youth Participation to describe levels of youth engagement. At the bottom of the ladder, you can see an engagement model that is providing information. At the top of the ladder, you see a model that has ideas initiated by youth and both adults and youth sharing in the decision making.
Could this same framework be used to think about how teachers engage parents in classrooms?
https://healthyschoolsbc.ca/healthy-schools-bc-resources/healthy-schools-network/
Typically, when we think of parent engagement, we think of the communication that happens through emails and calls to the home. We think of parent representatives on school committees, parent volunteers in school-wide activities, and parent-teacher night. The common thread here is that engagement happens on the school’s terms rather than the parent’s. From Hart’s ladder, this would look like the bottom 1-5 rungs (if we were being generous).
But what if we imagined a more engaging approach, one that supports parents to direct, define and lead the engagement?
This is especially true when looking at the culturally responsive classroom of 2019. For example, in speaking to culturally restorative practices at the First Nations School of Toronto (Parent Discussion Night, January 23, 2018), Estelle Simard described engaging Elders, parents, and community members in how culture should be taught in school, and the importance of creating meaningful engagement that enabled families to both initiate and define how they engage with their child’s school.
Estelle provided an example of a community where the Elders wanted regalia making, the creation of traditional and sometimes sacred clothing and accessories, to be a component of the school’s curriculum. The school then aligned curriculum and opened the door for the community to share their knowledge on the subject, creating a community of sharing and mutual respect.
We work hard to build relationships with our students. In order to increase parent engagement, we need to further that hard work by building relationships with parents, caregivers, and the community. So how can we honour this in our own classrooms and begin building bridges between home and school?
One of the benefits of working with the Sprig Learning Platform has been that it provides me with the opportunity to connect my classroom to every one of my students’ home lives, and to provide parents and caregivers with the tools they need to reinforce learning in their own homes.
The lasting effect of parents and teachers working together is clear when we see these students grow into healthy, confident, and curious lifelong learners. It’s important to find the approaches and strategies that work best for your classroom, but always remember to listen, be open-minded, and to have fun.
This guest post on the Sprig Learning Blog was contributed by Elise Twyford, a teacher and lifelong learner based out of Toronto, Ontario. You can follow Elise here.
That added piece of mind is thanks to our co-founder, Faud Khan. Faud is an international leader in cybersecurity with over 23 years of experience in the field, and he is known for his work with the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), as well as his work with the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC).
So who better to share what makes the Sprig Learning Platform so secure than Faud himself! Keep reading to hear exactly what it is that makes our education platform so secure, and what you should look for when choosing an edtech partner.
With Sprig Learning, we had an opportunity to create an edtech product that was not only going to benefit the market from a holistic learning perspective, but one that provides enhanced privacy and security within the school ecosystem.
Cybersecurity is top-of-mind for most people, including us. As parents ourselves, we wanted to reassure our students, their parents, and their educators that we did everything in our power to identify and mitigate any risks to our online platform – as well as how we operate our company. I want to take this opportunity to share with you exactly what it is that makes Sprig Learning so secure. Allow me to dive into a little cybersecurity speak to help explain our process:
So serious, in fact, that we have reviewed all of the possible ways in which our platform could be compromised. Every single one of them. Using a functional specification for our product development allows us to keep track of every component, identify potential risks, and methodically address each and every one. For a company that’s less than a year old, that is a pretty big accomplishment.
The functional specification makes it easier for us to complete both a Threat and Risk Assessment, as well as a Privacy Impact Assessment – two key components in creating and maintaining a secure platform. To be brief, completing a Threat and Risk Assessment allows us to identify any potential weaknesses in our digital properties, and address each one to reduce any risk. The Privacy Impact Assessment, on the other hand, helps us to identify and record any components of our system related to personal or student data that may be at risk – then develop a plan to manage and mitigate those risks.
These assessments and documentation cycles have allowed us to establish a Software Development Lifecycle that reduces the overall attack surface of our platform. We test ourselves and our platform. Constantly. Maintaining a secure platform doesn’t end once development is wrapped up. We aggressively monitor our servers for any sign of risk, and our multi-layered system ensures that if our web server were ever to become compromised, our student data remains safe. In fact, we even try to compromise our own platform with regular penetration testing in order to ensure that we did not make any mistakes in our code or in our server.
As you can see from a security and privacy perspective, we have gone above and beyond the typical edtech standards. Our engineering team is strong in these disciplines, which helps us to grow and continuously develop our security and privacy controls as our business evolves. That is a commitment to all of the members of the Sprig Learning Team, and our promise to you – the Sprig Community. Should you have any more questions about our approach to security and privacy, please reach out to us at security@spriglearning.com.
Yours,
Faud Khan
Co-Founder and CTO Sprig Learning
To design holistic assessment for early math, it’s crucial to grasp its essence and application in educational contexts. This article explores the concept of holistic assessment, its alignment with early math education, and the types of knowledge it evaluates.
Let’s start with an understanding about how holistic assessment works in early math.
In a recent article, Sprig brings attention to crucial aspects of early literacy leadership with “11 Common Situations in Early Literacy and How to Respond”.
It’s a must-read, if you haven’t done so already. Going beyond case studies and researched best practices, Sprig revisits previous blogs, extracting valuable insights that can pose challenging situations to early literacy leaders and presents their corresponding responses.
As discussed, those initial 11 scenarios were not exhaustive by any means, and so Sprig expands the discourse in this article by introducing three additional common situations faced by early literacy leadership.
Navigating early literacy leadership challenges in pre-kindergarten, kindergarten, and early elementary grades can be complex. As students embark on their educational journey, success in these formative years hinges on various factors.
While situational challenges may arise, the reassurance comes from insightful case studies that shed light on similar scenarios and effective responses.
This article covers 11 common situations, drawing from valuable knowledge shared in previous Sprig blogs.
Explore a wealth of information covering a spectrum of topics, all neatly compiled in this article.
Just like role models play a vital part in education, so too does culturally relevant content. Culturally responsive teaching has been a topic in education since the 1970’s, so it’s a wonder why many education systems continue to use the ‘melting pot’ approach. Learning is proven to be enhanced when children can relate to lessons on a cultural level. Before this can happen though, it’s important to understand what it means at a teaching level.
Culturally responsive teachers may have to abandon old ideas about cultural deficits. They must be careful not to convey judgment that might reflect upon students’ families, friends or histories. This often means looking inwards to address their own assumptions about behaviours, like the caregiver who forgot to sign the student’s agenda or missed a parent-teacher interview.
A culturally responsive teacher is grounded in pedagogical practices. They teach ideas and social relationships that enhance learning by relating the curriculum to students’ backgrounds, establishing connections with families and communities, understanding cultural experiences, creating shared learning experiences, and recognizing cultural differences as strengths.
By acknowledging a child’s specific needs, beliefs and backgrounds, curriculums could shift from the traditional ‘melting pot’ to a more inclusive ‘mosaic’ approach. But before making the switch, it’s important to understand culturally responsive teaching spans deeper than just culture.
According to Gloria Ladson-Billings, culturally responsive teaching is a pedagogy that empowers students intellectually, socially, emotionally and politically. Adopting culturally responsive teaching in your own practice means getting to know students in a way that is personal and individual. It’s important to embrace a student’s racial or ethnic background, but it’s only a fragment of their identity. Recognizing and respecting students means learning how they learn and about their areas of interest.
To be effective, teachers must show courage, confidence and capability in the classroom.
What makes culturally responsive teaching so important is how it filters content and teaching through cultural frames of reference. For example, if you ask a young Indigenous student in northern Saskatchewan what sound a subway train makes, they may have never even heard of one. Ask a Caucasian student from Toronto the same question and it’s a different story. The same could be said for an African-American student being taught to revere the discoveries of Christopher Columbus, an explorer known to have African slaves. Students whose lives and cultures are not treated as equal are less likely to buy into learning, whereas those who are empowered and feel valued will be ready to learn.
“While “caring about” conveys feelings of concern for one’s state of being, “caring for” is active engagement in doing something to positively affect it.”
– Geneva Gay, Culturally Responsive Teaching: Theory, Research, and Practice
With a culturally responsive curriculum, it makes room for learning opportunities that connect students to different cultures inside and outside the classroom. These connections can be made through something as simple as teaching a lesson through pop culture, movies or music the class will enjoy. The goal of culturally responsive teaching is to empower students and to expand their capabilities in other spheres of learning by making their own skills, languages and attitudes meaningful in the classroom.
The best way to establish meaningful, culturally responsive teaching is through collaboration. Connecting educators, caregivers and members of the community in student learning encourages sharing their wealth of cultural knowledge with students. Not only that, but when students see collaboration and mutual respect, they’re more likely to buy into their own education in meaningful ways.
Encouraging the use of native languages in class is another way to be culturally responsive. Encouraging students to use their native languages in class can result in students’ to be fluent in both the standard classroom language and native languages.
What it boils down to is culture and heritage are two things that no one chooses. They are an unconditional part of being human and should be treated with the same respect and privilege that education commands.
Without engaging cultural responsiveness, it’s inaccurate for educators to claim that they can attend to the needs of different students. Keeping up with current ‘melting pot’ academic practices will continue to influence students in divorcing themselves from their cultural backgrounds.
The key to connecting cultural responsiveness with curriculums is technology. It’s no secret that technology is a fantastic tool at making connections in education, but the important part is finding technology that connects caregivers, students, educators and community to bring cultural context to the classroom and enhance learning for every student.
As the year draws to a close, Sprig Learning reflects on 2024, a year filled with inspiring events, and impactful innovations.
Whether it be our work in collaboration with Indigenous communities, new innovations in early childhood assessments, or exploring game-based learning and evidence-based progress monitoring, it was a great year to spread our wings!
Here are a few standout moments from what was a truly transformative year for Sprig.
Sprig Reading addresses the growing literacy gap in early learners by providing teachers and schools with an advanced, customizable and one-of-a-kind monitoring of students’ reading abilities.
Curriculum mapping is a process used to align educational content, instruction, and assessments with specific learning goals outlined in a specified curriculum.
In Pre-K to Grade 3 classrooms, where early literacy development is crucial, curriculum mapping becomes essential to ensure students acquire the foundational skills necessary for reading success.
This blog explores the importance of curriculum mapping in early reading success and what can be done to make this very important process easy and simple.
