Empowering Parents

With the transition to Common Core State Standards in mathematics, parent communication has become increasingly important as many parents are unsure of how to best support their students. This post focuses on best practices shared in CUSD for Back to School night and beyond...

At Rolling Hills, Kathy Alsup promoted parent engagement by giving her parents the full student experience; homework AND a quiz! Prior to Back to School (B2S) night, she sent home a copy of her syllabus with instructions for parents to read. When they arrived at B2S night, she used Kahoot to check for understanding. Kahoot is a game-based assessment system that gives instant feedback on responses. Using Kahoot, she was able to determine if parents had indeed previewed the syllabus, and use their responses to determine the entry points of her discussion and what content she needed to cover more thoroughly.

Another fabulous tool that teachers Anna Lawrence, Kathy Alsup, and Gloria McGriff are using to promote parent communication is Remind. Remind allows teachers to create communication groups in order to send out information via text message about classroom events, grade updates, or anything else that requires communication (while keeping your phone number confidential).

At Monroe, Kindra Ahrens has been using technology to support lesson delivery, both with digital tools that accompany the pilot math curriculum, as well as using Google Classroom to move elements of her instruction into a digital space, promoting both increased engagement and communication. With a limited amount of time to share at B2S night, she hosted all of these crucial links on her class website and used her time with the parents to guide them to the resources available. If you scroll to the bottom of her resources page, she has embedded parent letters on using Google Apps for Ed in both English and Spanish.

As we move forward with the goal of increasing parent involvement in mathematics, please continue to share your best practices with our math teacher community!