Home-school cooperation shapes future of education
Su Guoquan teaches students online via Ding Ding, also known as DingTalk, in Linyi City, Shandong Province, on May 15, 2020. Photo: CFP
No school is an island. Education takes place in many locations and scenarios outside the classroom. Student growth depends on long-term and high-quality interactions and cooperation between families, schools, and society. Home-school-community collaboration is the best way to build a quality education system and promote students’ comprehensive development.
The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic highlights the importance of sharing responsibility between families and schools in education. Based on a nationwide survey we conducted, which involved some 130,000 teachers and 1.76 million parents, it was evident that home-school cooperation during the pandemic was somewhat of a “makeshift” plan. However, it represents a future trend in modern education that emphasizes building a school-family-community partnership.
Blurring home-school boundary
Online learning at home during the pandemic can be considered a large-scale social experiment for the future of education. According to our survey, 58.5% of students focused on studying at home, 32.8% on playing games, and 8.7% on family interactions during the long period of sheltering-in-place and social distancing in 2020.
Traditionally, home and school have separate functions. However, in the face of an infectious virus outbreak, students had to learn at home and for many families, fostering a learning environment became a key part of family life. As a result, parents took on important roles in the process of learning and teaching, and home settings replaced classrooms in the spatial sense, further blurring the boundary between home and school. In this trend, school education must be carried out directly in the background of family education. Therefore, a modern educational pattern which integrates school education, family education, and social or community education (centered on the growth of children) emerges.
The level of parent involvement during the COVID-19 outbreak was significantly higher than the time before. According to our survey, more than 90% of parents agreed that their children’s development depends on joint efforts from teachers and parents, and parents expect and are willing to learn more about family education and engage more in school education, while teachers are equally willing to do so.
The willingness and actions of parents and teachers to move beyond traditional roles has given home-school cooperation a broad foundation for institutional legitimacy and provided an opportunity to build a new type of home-school partnership. In contrast, if we cannot properly guide willing parents, it might lead to home-school conflicts, which in turn could drive schools to act and make structural changes.
During the stay-at-home period, the most frequent communication between parents and children was about children’s behavior and academic performance, while less frequent communication was about sharing personal experiences and family affairs, which added hard evidence to the blurring of boundaries between home and school.
Meanwhile, the parent-child relationship is characterized by close proximity and long hours. While parents have the opportunity to spend quality time with their children, it also leads to parent-child conflicts due to the lack of appropriate skills.
In the meantime, both parents and teachers tended to make positive comments about each other, with the former more prominent. About 64.5% of the surveyed teachers and 80.5% of the parents believed that the home-school relationship was better than usual during the pandemic period. Some 64.9% of the teachers and 80.4% of the parents believed that parents’ satisfaction with the school was higher.
Needless to say, home-school cooperation before the pandemic was the basis of this improved rating, showing a highly positive correlation, which significantly affected parents’ evaluations of parent-child relationships and students’ learning effects. It is inspirational to see that parents’ willingness to take on an active role in education can be activated by the school and then benefit everyone. On the macro level, parents’ educational identities can be enhanced to jointly create a healthy environment for children’s growth.
Structural differences
There are differences between urban and rural areas in terms of how families have spent this stay-at-home time. Our survey found that the proportion of urban families who listed learning as a main activity during social distancing was higher than that of rural families, whereas the proportion of rural families who reported their children mostly played was higher than that of urban families. Data also revealed apparent urban-rural disparities across a wide range of activities that required parents’ participation.
At the same time, both teachers and parents faced new challenges in online teaching. For teachers, working in a traditional classroom setting was the norm, while online courses were a different story, so a majority of teachers voiced concerns over not being able to control the quality of learning in virtual scenarios.
For parents, our survey found that those with higher educational backgrounds and higher professions lacked the time and energy to better help their children study, while others in relatively less advantageous positions found it hard to tutor their children. Most parents had no difficulties with networks, digital devices, and so on. To suit the diverse interests and needs of families, school should be more inclusive in terms of program design to encompass differentiated education levels for parents.
During the pandemic, home-school cooperation was mainly implemented by serving epidemic prevention and control and carrying out online teaching, such as sending out epidemic prevention and control notifications and getting feedback on students’ learning and behavior at home.
However, there was no significant difference in terms of teachers’ assistance to parents in family education, parents’ participation in school affairs, and communication and mutual assistance between parents. To some extent, all these indicated that home-school cooperation during the epidemic was a temporary measure, which may disappear with the recovery of offline teaching. This is also a traditional disadvantage of extensive and inefficient communication between home and school.
Often, home-school contact is passive and crisis triggered, when students have academic, behavioral, and emotional problems. However, in fact, home-school cooperation should not be a belated reaction, but a precautionary act.
Also, the communication is typically one-way, with parents’ feedback and needs sometimes overlooked, not to mention the lack of an organized communication platform. In some schools, parents’ committees have yet to be established, or remain a mere formality, failing to play their role as a bridge between the school and families. What’s more, the fact that parents seek help from teachers exposes the inadequacy of parents’ abilities to handle family education.
Policy advice
The problems seen in home-school cooperation are universal, which requires guidance and guarantee on a policy level. The current study demonstrates that government intervention through policy formulation is critical to the development of home-school cooperation. Therefore, we need to make sure family education and home-school cooperation are included in the government’s central educational planning, in the objectives of educational institutions, in budgetary projects, in normal education and professional training systems for teachers before and after they serve, and in educational evaluation programs of governments at all levels.
In the end, a logic that features lawful regulation of school behavior, active parents’ involvement, and better family education should be formed, so that schools become the center of parent education and service, and parents support schools on every possible front, thus producing a stable home-school cooperation structure. The boundary between home and school is constantly blurred, the division of labor is diversified, and the responsibilities overlap, all of which are characteristics of the new form of home-school partnership.
At the early stage of home-school cooperation’s institutionalization, we should try to enhance trust between parties, and integrate such mutual trust and mutual understanding into the principles and norms of home-school cooperation.
In practice, work could be carried out separately on the classroom and school level. At the class level, traditional teacher-student interactions can be developed into a teacher-student-school-parent-family interaction structure without losing its previous focus. On top of this, on a school level, parents can be incorporated as structural elements in education and home-school cooperation can become part of teachers’ official duty.
At present, the lack of professional training is the main reason for teachers to feel that they have spared no effort yet achieved substandard results. In this light, teachers need to master a complete set of technical specifications and basic procedures to better provide guidance for family education and carry out home-school cooperation. This actually involves a series of reforms such as normal education, teachers’ job descriptions, and parent education.
During the long stay-at-home time, the disadvantages of traditional family education were magnified, and parents encountered different difficulties, just as their needs varied. These findings inspire us to build a new type of home-school relationship. Schools should fully activate the willingness and potential of parents to engage, strengthen parents’ ability to participate, and provide personalized services to meet the needs of different groups.
Zhang Jun is an associate research fellow from the Jiangxi Provincial Institute of Education Evaluation and Monitoring; Wu Zhonghan is a professor from the School of Education at Jiangxi Normal University.
Edited by YANG XUE