Aims

• to encourage parents to take part in their children’s (pre)school experiences;
• to strengthen the family-school connections on the challenges of children's education;
• to develop innovative-tools and methods for parents-teachers cooperation;
• to make the school’s learning environment more “visible” to parents.

Links to curriculum

Literacy in the language(s) of instruction.

Any subjects, depending on the content an of the teachers’ and parents’ meeting

How to...

Teachers are always willing to enhance communication with parents and parents are very curious on children’s school life. The use of videos, picked up from movies, from the web, from the Isotis virtual learning environment or even better from their real school life, can be a powerful tool to trigger conversations with parents, listen to each other and go deeper in talking about thoughts, concerns, strategies in educating and upbring children, making school life more accessible to parents.

To do so, teachers can invite parents to a meeting where the use of videos or clips will be foreseen. They can decide what kind of clips/videos to use according to the level of communication and to the main aims of the meeting. If needed, linguistic mediators or some parents will facilitate the conversation by translating.

The discussion is introduced by the projection of a clip: 

• if you want to talk in general about a topic with parents and if you have never used this technique of showing videos from your school life and teaching activity, you can start using a video or a clip from other sources (movies, web), selecting interesting ones on the focal topics you want to address (for example, to talk on multicultural identity and multilingualism: “Almanya-My family goes to Germany”, min. 8H06-13H39). You can also show the short clips that you find on VLE (e.g. on the stages of second language learning, on how to promote multilingualism, on global competences or on social justice etc.)
• If you feel confident and you want to meet the interest and curiosity of parents about their children's experience at school, or if you want to show and talk about a specific experience you are involving the children in, you can propose clips videotaped at school and in your classroom. Children can be also engaged in documenting and videotaping what they do at school.

The vision of the clip/s will be used as a stimulus or indirect question to provoke discussion and dialogue among teachers parents.

At the end of the discussion, the teachers can ask parents to think if there are other aspects of the school life that they would like to know better so that the teachers' team could show to the parents the experience of children at school by preparing short clips to be shared with parents on the digital classroom space. They will ask parents to express what are they curious about, what are the questions they have about it.

It can be engaging and motivating to involve the children in the preparation of the clips. In this casa parents (or a couple of parents representing the class) can prepare a letter to the class to ask some questions that the class will provide through the video-clips (for example: Dear children of class XY, as parents we are very curious about your linguistic school experience. Would you be available to show us your experience at school? Could you video-record some school activities? We asked your teachers to upload the videos on your digital classroom space and share it with us...”). This letter can be uploaded to the space of the class in the ISOTIS virtual learning environment. The teachers can then read the letter to the class.

With the support of children, teachers will document through video-recording children’s experiences at school and will edit short videos.

The videos can be shown to parents during a meeting where they watch together a selection of videos at school. This moment of sharing is followed by a discussion on the topic. In alternative, the videos can be shared on the class noticeboard of the class or on an specific forum inside the class space including parents and teachers.

Further discussion on the topic will take place between parents and teachers on the platform where a forum on the subject can be open and where further videos can be uploaded. If needed, the teacher can provide some key-questions or “provoking”-questions to animate the debate on the platform.

To get some tips in how conducting a meeting using videos and clips, see this activity in Professional Development