Spring, 1999 No. 6 National Network of Partnership Schools
Families and Schools Interact to Support Students' Learning Activities at Home
Mavis G. Sanders, Assistant Director
Type 4 involvement—Learning at Home—is central to a school’s comprehensive program of partnerships. Research in the United States and abroad has shown that when families get involved with their children’s learning at home, students’ attitudes toward learning and school performance improve. To encourage this very important form of home-school partnership, many schools are meeting a key challenge for Type 4 involvement by implementing interactive homework.
One form of interactive homework is Teachers Involve Parents in Schoolwork (TIPS), developed by Joyce L. Epstein, Karen Clark Salinas, colleagues at the Center on School, Family and Community Partnerships at Johns Hopkins University, and teachers in several school districts. TIPS is designed to promote greater communication between families and children around homework. It does not require family members to "teach" children school subjects. Instead, it encourages children to share their work and enables families to better support, praise, guide, monitor, and discuss the work that their children bring home from school.
Many schools across the country use TIPS activities in their elementary and middle school classrooms. Some high schools in the National Network of Partnership Schools are beginning to develop TIPS activities for high school students and families. Mark Bignell at David Glasgow Farragut High School, a Department of Defense School in Rota, Spain, has developed TIPS activities for his music classes.
Schools in the National Network are experimenting with other forms of interactive homework. For example, Lois T. Murray School in Baltimore has a successful program to involve family and community members in the education of children with special needs (see the Research Brief). The school selects seventeen topics on which they focus during the school year, including traffic safety, public transportation, grocery shopping, dining out, and clothes shopping. There are classroom and community-based activities for each topic. At the start of the year, parents are given a schedule of the seventeen units. During each PTO meeting, school staff give families information on the content of the units being covered that month, and discuss the skills that will be taught. This information also is provided in the school’s monthly newsletter for parents who cannot attend the PTO meetings. Further, to ensure that all families can participate, a week before each unit begins, teachers send letters to parents describing the unit and activities to do with their children to reinforce the targeted skills at home. According to school principal Mr. Johnny Smith, "Our goal is to keep parents informed about the education of our children."
When schools meet the challenge of developing interactive homework, families become more active supporters of students’ learning. Everyone wins—students, families, and schools. Does your school have interactive homework planned for the upcoming academic year? If not, take the challenge to work with teachers during the summer to develop interactive homework activities for 1999-2000. See Chapter 7 in School, Family and Community Partnerships: Your Handbook for Action for information on the TIPS process. You may also visit Publications on the Network’s web site at http://www.partnershipschools.org or contact Karen Salinas at 410-516-8818.
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