Blog Posts By Larry_Ferlazzo
Editor's note: Over the few days, we have published guest postings by Renee Moore and Larry Ferlazzo on how teachers view parent engagement in public schools. Today, Larry responds to Renee's posting.
Renee’s point about how teachers are intimately involved with parents on a day-to-day basis outside of school in her rural area is a good one. In many (if not most?) urban schools, teachers never see parents (or their students) in a non-school situation since most of us don’t live in the same communities where we teach.
I’d say that rural-urban difference emphasizes the particular need for urban schools to embrace home-visiting by teachers and/or other types of “engagement” efforts. The personal trust that parents have for Renee and her colleagues in their rural community, I think, is less likely to occur in ...
Editor's note: This is the second in a series of guest blogs on how teachers view parent engagement and involvement in public schools. Yesterday, Renee Moore offered her perspective on how much parent involvement educators really want. Today, Larry Ferlazzo shares his thoughts on the difference between parent involvement and parent engagement.
“When it comes to a breakfast of ham and eggs, the chicken is involved but the pig is committed.”
This old saying is roughly analogous to the issue facing schools today as they consider the kind of relationships they want to build with the parents of their students. I would characterize it as a difference between parent involvement (the chicken) and parent engagement (the pig). I first become aware of this contrast through a study of organizing work by the Industrial Areas Foundation in Texas schools. Boston College professor Dennis Shirley wrote about the IAF’s decades-long efforts in his 1997 book Community Organizing For Urban School Reform.
Merriam Webster’s Dictionary defines involvement as “to enfold or envelop.” It defines engagement as “to interlock with; to mesh.” Those definitions get to the crux of the difference. When schools involve parents they are leading with ...
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A Village Route to Early Childhood Education
In the 1990s, we at Davenport Community Schools noticed a trend: Children were coming to kindergarten unprepared to learn. A troublingly low number of our district’s children (more than half of whom receive free or reduced price lunch) had preschool experience. Recognizing the importance of early childhood education in ensuring students are ready to succeed in school and life, we developed the Children’s Village, which includes formal preschool classes and all-day, year-round programming serving children from six weeks to five years old. Today, when a Children’s Village student arrives for the first day of kindergarten, the teacher can say, “This child is ready to learn.”
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