Building Parent/Professional Partnerships: An Innovative Approach for Teacher Education

Abstract

The value of collaboration between parents and educators is well-recognized. However, many preservice educators feel they lack the skills and confidence needed to establish and maintain effective partnerships with parents. This qualitative study was designed to explore one approach to improving teacher preparation with respect to parent/professional partnerships. An undergraduate course for preservice special educators was modified to provide students with multiple opportunities for meaningful interaction with parents of children with disabilities. One parent served as co-instructor of the course while six additional parents were embedded in the course for the entire semester. Pre-and postintervention focus groups were conducted to describe the impact of this course innovation on the preservice students' dispositions and competencies regarding parent/professional partnerships. Results suggest that student dispositions changed from viewing parents as uncaring, uninvolved, and unknowledgeable to valuing them as experts on the child and partners in the decision-making process.

Understanding teachers' perspectives of factors that influence parental involvement practices in special education in Barbados

“…One such setting was case site 1 where limited parental involvement occurred because of a lack of democratisation of parent-teacher conference process and the discontinuation of programmes, which facilitated parent-child interaction. This finding is consistent with others at the international level (Baeck, 2010;Peterson 2010), which suggests that it is more common to find a hierarchical relationship between parents and teachers (Murray, Curran and Zellers, 2008), where parents only play supportive roles in their children's education. Within the context of special education, this is problematic because parents are the purveyors of key information about their children and their educational success is dependent on a good working partnership between parents and teachers.…”

Learning From Parents of Children With Disabilities

“…Consistent with Murray et al (2008), participants learned that although some parents lacked information, many were highly informed and could serve as great liaisons into their children's world. Parents stressed the value of empathizing with children with disabilities by working to assume the child's world view as a means of developing effective communication and trust.…”

Introducing Preservice Teachers to Family-Centered Practices: A Scoping Review

“…Of the 17 included articles, eight featured qualitative analysis only (Able et al, 2014;Amaro-Jimenez, 2016;Amatea et al, 2013;Bofferding, Hoffman, & Kastberg, 2016;Bottoms, Ciechanowski, Jones, de la Hoz, & Fonseca, 2017;McHatton et al, 2013;Murray et al, 2008;Waddell, 2013;Zeichner, Bowman, Guillen, & Napolitan, 2016); four featured quantitative analysis only (Accardo & Xin, 2017;Bingham & Abernathy, 2007;Brown et al, 2014;Jacobbe et al, 2012), and three featured a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods or described their study as mixed methods (Bergman, 2013;McCullough & Ramirez, 2012;Ramirez et al, 2016).…”

“…Program majors included elementary education, math education, bilingual education, secondary education, special education, early childhood education, dual special and elementary education, and health education. Some studies did not report on majors (Able et al, 2014;Amaro-Jimenez, 2016;Amatea et al, 2013;Bofferding et al, 2016;Brown et al, 2014;Jacobbe et al, 2012;Murray et al, 2008). The majority of participants in all studies reporting on gender were female and Caucasian, but studies also included African American PSTs (Able et al, 2014;Accardo & Xin, 2017;Amatea et al, 2013;Collier et al, 2015;Jacobbe et al, 2012;Waddell, 2013), Latino PSTs (Able et al, 2014;Accardo & Xin, 2017;Bottoms et al, 2017;Ramirez et al, 2016), Asian-American PSTs (Able et al, 2014;Amatea et al, 2013;Bottoms et al, 2017;Brown et al, 2014;Jacobbe et al, 2012); Pacific Islander PSTs (Amatea et al, 2013;Bottoms et al, 2017), biracial PSTs (Amatea et al, 2013), and those selecting "other" in this category (Brown et al, 2014;Collier et al, 2015).…”