Engaging all families: creating a positive school culture by putting research into practice
Steven M. Constantino, 2003
Lanham, MD, Scarecrow Education
$21.79 (pbk), 178 pp.
ISBN 1‐57886‐062‐8
Creating a positive school climate: how principals and teachers can solve problems together
M. Beadoin and M. Taylor, 2004
Thousand Island, CA, Sage
$65.95 (hbk), $29.95 (pbk), 210 pp.
ISBN 1‐4129‐0491‐9 (hbk), ISBN 1‐4129‐0492‐7 (pbk)
Helping kids hope: a teacher explores the need for meaning in our schools and our lives
N. E. Gill, 2003
Lanham, MD, Scarecrow Education
$ 34.95 (pbk), 201 pp.
ISBN 0‐8108‐4678‐0
There is a burgeoning market in books in the USA addressing how to improve schools and the lives of the children in them. Three noteworthy volumes, available now in paperback, provide different and complementary takes on what we should be doing to improve schools and school communities.
In Engaging all families Steven Constantino, a former high school principal, and currently Professor of Education at George Mason University, focuses on the need for school communities to be more inclusive of students' families. Reflecting on the successful turn‐around of the troubled high school he led, the author concludes that ‘the focus on families and connecting them with the education of their children has made a huge impact on the success of our school and our ability to craft a positive school culture’ (p. 4). Constantino's message, from beginning to end, is this: the more schools can engage families in the academic lives of their children, ideally bringing them into the life of the school, the more likely the students will perform at their optimal level. School administrators typically profess to be family friendly, welcoming parental involvement, inquiries and collaboration in dealing with their child's needs and behaviour. However, most schools do not sufficiently put that principle into practice, the author maintains. It is argued that administrators must lead the drive to increase family involvement in their children's schooling and raise awareness of its promise. Teacher‐family communication and collaboration can provide valuable support for both educators and care‐givers in carrying out their respective responsibilities toward children.
Complementing Constantino's focus on the effects on school climate of interaction between family and school, Beadoin and Taylor focus on the effects on school climate of interaction of teachers and administrators within a school. In Creating a positive school climate: how principals and teachers can solve problems together, the emphasis is on the professional relationship between teachers and administrators. Beadoin and Taylor begin by recounting the now familiar litany: schools are being asked to do more for children, often with less financial resources and community support, while parents and other guardians are working longer hours and struggling to provide psycho‐social support to their children. This context of stretched resources and frustrated hopes can have negative impacts upon school personnel and students, leaving both feeling isolated and ignored. The purpose of their book, the authors suggest, is to assist educators to understand and solve staff problems, prevent conflicts and generally enrich their school culture. The table of contents gives a thumbnail sketch of the domains covered: Understanding the different experiences of teachers and principals; Creating an environment for change; Typical school culture problems and their effects; When serious problems divide the staff; Changing staff habits without conflict; Preventing problems and creating a climate of support; Practices that support a caring school culture; and Working with parents and volunteers.
In contrast to these two volumes, another book, Helping kids hope: a teacher explores the need for meaning in our schools and our lives, explores what the author illustrates is an important undercurrent of school life—the meaning inherent in our personal relationships. While the other two authors focus on the more usual structural dimensions of school life—relationships between schools and families, and between administrators and teachers—Gill's goal is to emphasise the need that children, and indeed all people, have for a sense of purpose, a belief that their experience is meaningful, and that their choices and actions have an impact. This, Gill believes, gives children the hope they need to persevere and succeed in life and supports the positive social interactions at the heart of school climate.
Each author heralds the merits of his/her own approach. Constantino contends that substantial research supports the importance of family engagement in children's education. He reports that research in his own school replicates the literature in the field. Benefits of family participation in school include an increase in student attendance, decrease in the drop‐out rate, more frequent positive parent‐child communication, improvement in student attitudes and behaviour and more parent‐community support for the school. Programs designed to assist students in acclimatising to the school and helping them acquire a sense of belonging are appreciated by students, the author claims, and tend to be well attended. Additionally, Constantino reports, school efforts to assist families in having greater access to teachers and school information, including grades, were welcomed by students. While parental access to information is generally believed to be a good thing, the author assumes parents are benevolent and reasonable and he underplays the potential for negative parent‐child interactions. He mentions only in passing that if parents punish students when school information is shared with them it might in fact result in decreased student engagement.
Beadoin and Taylor argue that it is most productive to see problems between administrators and staff as residing in specific contexts and cultures, rather than in the individuals interacting in that context. The authors attribute this insight to a therapeutic approach called the Narrative Approach. They highlight the different perspectives of typical principals and teachers, suggesting that much confusion and miscommunication comes about as a result of teachers and principals not really understanding each other or themselves. They argue that principals and teachers alike need practice in articulating their experience and they need to depersonalise the struggles associated with their role. Quoting extensively from school principals, the text sets out to give the reader an insider's view of the responsibilities and pressures they experienced in their leadership role. Talking about problems in externalised ways has several major impacts that facilitate a more productive problem‐solving strategy, the authors note. On a personal level it allows people who are engaged in behaviour they do not like to harness their dislike as dislike of the problem rather than as dislike of themselves, creating both hope and agency. On the group level, when a problem is externalised it becomes tangible, and the group can work more effectively to solve the problem, rather than simply desiring to quarantine the ‘problematic individual’.
Gill's book is an educational memoir of sorts, filled with interesting stories, student quotes, poetry and decades of her own journal writing, reflection and experimental educational practice. At the heart of this wide‐ranging story, resurfacing periodically, often at unexpected moments, is the quest for meaning, for identifying and maximising the meaningfulness of each of our lives. Gill especially emphasises the interconnectedness of our lives as learners: as students, as teachers and as people who wrestle with jobs, aging, loss and the search for love. Educators may find many things of interest in this book. Gill has much to offer from her long and varied career and her insistent attention to what makes educational experiences meaningful. This book is not written in a linear fashion, however, though readers appreciative of the complex twists and turns of the life and thought of a reflective educator may find this an informative example.
Constantino further elaborates the benefits of a strong family‐school collaboration. He uses the concept social capital to articulate what individuals gain when a community collaborates in this fashion. Analogous to financial capital, which allows people to pay for goods and services, social capital makes available resources and services through connections to networks of people and information. It allows a community and a school to work smarter, actively utilising resources across a broader population of constituents. One readily available means to increase the ease of family‐school communication is technological. Voice‐mail, e‐mail, interactive websites and other two‐way communication systems are spreading. These means of communication help deal with three of the biggest obstacles to family engagement: scarcity of time, the obstacles posed by cultural and linguistic differences from the majority school population and parental and family uncertainty about school and schooling. Despite the ease of electronic communication, the author notes, ‘it is the telephone that continues to have all the advantages of familiarity, easy use and widespread availability’ (p.40). Telephones are widely available, the author notes, except in classrooms and other venues easily accessible to teachers during the day. Administrators should do all they can, Constantino argues, to provide telephones to facilitate communication between teachers and families.
Beadoin and Taylor further delineate the benefits of their approach to school climate by addressing at length specific common problems such as gossiping among teachers and principals, problem‐saturated conversation, cliques, the us‐them attitude, resentment and negativity, community disrespect, scarcity of time, issues of hierarchy and interpersonal competition. They argue that ‘The only way vicious cycles of interactions can be broken is when both parties become keenly aware of their contributions to the pattern and very articulate about how the externalised problem pushes them into acting against their better judgment (their preferred versions of themselves)’ (p.95). The book's greatest strength is in its resources for shifting the perspective of those that read it, supporting a self‐reflective assessment of how each of us contributes to the problems in our immediate inter‐personal contexts. The authors rightly argue that school culture and climate are at the heart of a healthy school community and are as important for the teachers and staff as for the children. This book's many resources for therapeutic intervention into troubled staff relationships will be a welcome salve to schools with staff problems.
Gill offers teachers an academic intervention premised on the lessons she has learned over her extensive teaching career. She describes a college course she and colleagues designed that first and foremost addresses students' need for meaningful interpretations of their educational experience. Entitled The need for meaning, this course she argues, offers teachers a way of connecting with students, like many of hers, who are unmotivated, undisciplined and not positively connected to their school or educational experience.
All three authors offer helpful insights into the problems they are addressing. Additionally, all concur that the relationships, between home and school, between administrators and staff and between students' sense of what is meaningful and the schools' understanding of what is meaningful are at the heart of a healthy school climate and an effective educational experience. While each author focuses on a unique part of the challenge, all promise to support a healthier and more satisfying educational experience.