Children do their best when they have the skills, support, and motivation to do so. By collaborating with your child’s school, you increase opportunities for your child to get the support they need. A home-school partnership capitalizes on your child’s skills, your knowledge of your child, and educators’ knowledge of learning and development. By partnering together, you can help your child achieve more than home or school could accomplish alone.
It is never too early or too late to start building or improving a partnership. This process can be challenging, and emotions can run high. However, small steps can build up to big improvements. Below are some tips, reflections, and strategies to keep in mind as your child begins a brand new school year.
Connect With Your Values
Values are big-picture, long-term ideals that give our actions meaning and purpose. They serve as an internal compass that guides our actions toward the role we want to play in building the type of life we want for our children.
Ask yourself these questions:
- What kind of life does your child want to lead?
- What kind of life do you want for your child?
- What role do you want to play in your child’s learning and development?
Openly Communicate
Ongoing open communication is key to a home-school partnership. This requires communication with both your child and their educator(s).
Communicate with your child. For example, facilitate conversations around self-awareness and self-advocacy to share information about strengths, preferences, interests, and needs or essentials:
- Ask what they like/don’t like about school.
- Observe how they spend their time/what they choose to talk about.
- Give them choices between activities/items and see what they select.
For additional resources, download the “Self-Awareness for Self-Advocacy: Student Version” and “Three-Step Self-Advocacy Process: Student Workbook.”
Communicate with educators. Ask to set up a time at the start of the school year to talk about working together to support your child’s engagement and learning.
Monitor Progress
Ongoing progress monitoring helps us know whether what we are doing is working and whether we need to adjust our supports. It also helps you proactively support your child, reinforce successes, catch problems early, and hold partnership members (including yourself) accountable.
Which of these progress monitoring strategies might be helpful?
- Document brief communications to help paint a picture and identify patterns over time.
- Ask your child’s educator how they currently monitor academic and behavioral progress and how you can get regular updates on this tracking.
- Work with your child and their educators to develop a formal progress-monitoring system involving structured daily or weekly feedback on a few specific behaviors.
See It Through
As your child’s educator puts in the work, you should too! For example, you can reinforce and review progress by:
- Reviewing progress with your child while focusing on what they can do to improve success.
- Focusing on what to do next time as opposed to what went wrong or why they did it.
- Praising expected behavior/effort at least three times more than correcting problematic behavior.
Problem Solve
Your partnership efforts may sometimes veer off course from your big-picture values. Your child may not respond to supports as intended, or your communication may hit a roadblock.
When you notice your partnership is off track, identify 1-2 actions that might help improve your partnership. Examples include:
- Ask how you can support school efforts rather than putting all responsibility on the school.
- Ask for and listen to the educator’s perspective, even if you do not agree with all of it.
- Focus conversations on specific, objective behaviors and situational factors rather than vague personality traits.
- Work together to identify positive skills to teach and environmental supports to promote those skills rather than focusing on challenging behaviors to reduce.
- Focus on actions within your control instead of conditions outside of your control.
Advocate
Speaking up on your child’s behalf or helping your child use their own voice typically results in better supports. You can respectfully “press for success” by asking for more than what is freely offered.
Could any of the individuals below contribute to your efforts?
- trusted individuals who know your child well (e.g., family, friend, child’s therapist, teacher, or tutor)
- a family advocate trained to help families build these partnerships
Practice Gratitude
The process of building a home-school partnership can be challenging for both caregivers and educators. It is perfectly normal to have strong thoughts and big emotions along the way. You are the expert on the needs of your child and your family. Listen when your expertise tells you to take a break and reconnect with the people and activities that give you joy, even if it is just for a few minutes.
Ask yourself:
- What is one small thing you can do within the next day to practice self-care?
- What is one area where you can show gratitude to your child?
- What is one area where you can show gratitude to your child’s educator(s)?
For additional information and ideas on building a home-school partnership, download the “Building a Home-School Partnership Toolkit.”
We’ve developed an “Action Plan for Building an Effective Team”. This resource is also available in Spanish.
Questions about IEPs? Goal setting? Selecting a Behavioral Services Provider? Check out our Families First archived resources page on Building an Effective Team for tons of helpful resources and videos.
The Treatment and Research Institute for Autism Spectrum Disorders (TRIAD) is an autism treatment and research center based out of Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Learn more at https://vkc.vumc.org/vkc/triad/home.