Essay Sample on Parent-Teacher Partnership: Building the Parent School

Parents should be involved in the project of the educational center where their children study. The parents, at the end of the formative process of boys and girls, want the best for their; teachers want students promoted with honors, full of human values, moral and religious ethics. To achieve these results, parents and educators must work together, creating a meeting point, "The Parent School." Starting from the changes that the traditional family has undergone in its structure and dynamics and from the difficulties that it must face to preserve its integrity as a fundamental nucleus of society, it is necessary to observe these changes and reflect how educators and parents can work together. In a globalized society dominated by a culture with characteristics such as permissiveness, loss of meaning, lack of commitment values, etc., it is urgent to rethink how to guide children towards the elaboration of life through learning.

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All this leads to an urgent implementation of concrete projects, where a space of reflection and sincere dialogue can be created, in joint work between parents and everyone involved in the difficult mission of educating the children and young people of today. For its part, the school should give guidance on these issues that could be: health problems, school difficulties, and student relationships; what they mean, why they occur and to what extent parents can favor the development of their children and the coexistence of the family. In a society like ours, the family and the school must have clear roles and promote community life, as the foundation of all subsequent social experience. The early experience in the family of forms of communication-based on dialogue and consensus will sustain democratic attitudes of participation, collaboration, and cooperation. Consequently, this learning will be reinforced in the school if it puts into practice activities in which students work as a team, use negotiation to resolve their conflicts and put into practice the values of community life, which they learn from home. It is essential that parents and teachers agree on how to make effective the participation of the family in school so that their relationships are mutually supportive and face the challenges presented by this world. This will have a positive impact on the education of children and will give coherence to their experiences. The training of teachers for the educational participation of the family, as well as that of the pedagogues, would improve the educational task entrusted to both institutions. From this approach, the role of the teacher mediates between the school and family culture, and teachers' fears of parental interference in their tasks would be overcome. Participation would be interpreted in the sense of collaboration and mutual support to jointly design the common project of educating students to help them grow and develop their life project, introducing strategies to adapt to the challenges that are presented to them. On the other hand, parents would feel involved in their children's school trajectory in an effective way. In this line, the pedagogue would also have an important role in the design of training programs in this new educational field that arises as a social demand.

Finally, from the schools themselves, it is necessary to find a system that facilitates communication between the school and the family, based on the assumptions that underlie the sense of community, characterized by participation and a common commitment to joint action. The difficulty lies in how to carry it out. One way to overcome this difficulty is to facilitate the meeting between parents and teachers, where they show the desire to find innovative ways to encourage participation, as well as to create an open communication environment in which problems, concerns, fears are expressed, fears and insecurities, and mutual needs for help and collaboration. The involvement of families in the life of the center is achieved by learning to work together in various activities, which concerning their respective roles, parents and teachers can program, assuming that teamwork is an effective way to stimulate and support mutually. This entails valuing the enrichment that for the own personal development supposes the contribution of the ideas and initiatives of the others. The vision of work in mutual collaboration, part of a concept of change and improvement of reality that can be modified, through the joint action of all those involved, while affecting improving the quality of the teaching and school life.

One of the main elements to invite parents to participate in the life of the center is to provide them with information. In most cases, students who belong to families of low socioeconomic status, usually, are not well informed of the calls for scholarships and grants they can access, so they do not request them. On the other hand, due to their environment, parents have fewer expectations of the future than those of the middle class, so they do not encourage their children to study, especially when the school trajectory is accompanied by failure and failure in school, in addition to the inferiority of conditions in which they find themselves to study when lacking adequate means and environments. Undoubtedly, the approach of inequalities in education must be placed in a broad social and cultural context. We can not venture to say that inequalities of opportunities can be solved only from school because it is related to social conditions and status; but it can improve aspects and means related to the school to allow the students to continue their studies, as it is to involve the parents in this educational task. It is important to let parents know that when they are involved in all aspects of school life, positive effects on their children's performance can help them assess the consequences of their support in the school's educational task, in which they have a role to play.

Family, parents, educators, and school have different social functions, but complementary. Given the complexity of today's world, they must unite their efforts to overcome the difficulties they face because, ultimately, their raison d'etre is a function of the child's role in their educational task. This time presents a level of demands to family and school education that calls for the preparation and formation of a new educational style based on learning to live in the community. Parents and teachers are called to respond with the commitment to participate in this common task, each from its field of knowledge and experience to meet the affective, cognitive and social needs of children and all those involved in the educational community.

Learning should be based on the pillars of Education for the future: Learning to know, Learning to be, Learning to do and Learning to live in the community. These pillars have to support the relationships between school and family, favoring communication, participation, and collaboration, to overcome the structural factors of the school itself, as well as the implicit theories of parents and teachers about education, teaching, family, the school, the role of each one in this task, etc. It is necessary to open the windows to the history of a new conception of the family and the school in its educational task. Both institutions require structural and cognitive restructuring, modification, and adaptation to a new style of education and an open attitude to the formation of students oriented to education for community life.