Involving Parents of Students with Special needs: 25 Ready-to-Use Strategies

For my family

Copyright © 2008 by Corwin.

First Skyhorse Publishing edition 2016.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Lisa Riley

Print ISBN: 978-1-63450-780-6

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-63450-791-2

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

List of Figures

Preface

Acknowledgments

About the Author

1. Introduction

Parent Involvement Is Important and Up to You!

Your Personal Philosophy of Parent Involvement

2. Getting Started

Strategy 1: Personalized Letterhead

Strategy 2: Parent Contact Log

Strategy 3: Introductory Letter

Strategy 4: Parent Volunteer Invitation

3. Designing Your Classroom to Educate Parents

Strategy 5: The Visible Curriculum

4. Group Written Communication and Interaction

Strategy 6: Suggestion Box Letter

Strategy 7: Class Newsletter

5. Personalized Written Communication and Interaction

Strategy 8: Weekly Progress Report

Strategy 9: Parent Appreciation Letter

Strategy 10: Print Resource Letter

Strategy 11: Internet Resource Letter

Strategy 12: E-mail Communication

6. Telephone Communication

Strategy 13: Phone Call to an Organization

Strategy 14: Phone Calls to Parents

Strategy 15: Voice Mail

7. In-Person Meetings

Strategy 16: Parent Group Meetings

Strategy 17: Preconference Parent Survey

Strategy 18: Tips for Successful Conferences

8. Helping Parents Teach Their Children At Home

Strategy 19: IEP/IFSP Practice Letter

Strategy 20: Home Activity Calendar

Strategy 21: Home Response Cards

Strategy 22: Make-It-Take-It Workshop

Strategy 23: Summer Activities Letter

9. Challenges to Parent Involvement

Strategy 24: Conflict Situations

Obstacles to Parent Involvement

10. Staying Organized and Planning for Next Year

Strategy 25: Parent Involvement Portfolio

Parent Involvement Action Plan

Make a Plan

References

Index

List of Figures

* Intellectual disabilities include mental retardation, cognitive disabilities, and developmental disabilities.

Preface

Ihave tremendous admiration for teachers. Teaching, whether in general education or special education, is a complex, time-consuming, and difficult job. Teaching has become even more challenging in recent years, as teachers are expected to respond to more complicated laws, changing standards, stricter regulations, and even large-scale societal problems, the unfortunate results of which students may bring with them from home to school.

Yes, teachers face many challenges and have many demands made upon them. First and foremost they are charged with providing effective, evidence-based instruction and with motivating their students to succeed and achieve their highest potential. Teachers are also responsible for helping their students develop positive self-esteem and appropriate socialization skills so that they can function as productive members of society. Given the increasing financial and personal pressures faced by many families, the diversity of the American student population, and often shrinking education budgets, successfully completing all of these tasks is a tall order.

In addition, teachers juggle a host of time-consuming noninstructional tasks, such as playground duty, fundraising, and supervising study halls, which keep their schools running but their professional plates full to overflowing and their time at a premium.

Additional demands are placed on special educators. Current issues—such as Highly Qualified Teacher status, IDEA 2004 requirements, inclusion, collaboration with general education teachers and related service personnel, alternate assessment, academic versus functional curriculum, assistive technology, managing with and without teacher aides, and new mandates such as Response to Intervention—must be properly addressed.

One important task shared by all teachers is establishing strong communication links with parents and promoting parent involvement in their children’s education. Research has shown that parent/family involvement has many positive effects on student performance, so teachers need to make their efforts to get parents involved a high priority. Parents of students with special needs are a valuable but too often untapped resource, and these parents can provide effective home instruction as well as serve as strong allies of teachers who could certainly use additional assistance.

But getting parents of students with special needs actively involved in their children’s education is a responsibility that may seem overwhelming to teachers, especially in the hectic early stages of their careers when there are so many new and pressing demands being made on their time.

That’s where this book comes in. It provides teachers, whether new or experienced, with a variety of teacher-friendly strategies for establishing good communication and initiating and maintaining productive ongoing parent involvement throughout the school year. General education teachers, especially those who have students with disabilities in their classrooms, will find these strategies useful not only with the parents of students with special needs but with the parents of their typically developing students as well.

I am convinced that all teachers can use a variety of simple but effective strategies for communicating with and involving parents provided they have clear and reasonable mandates and useful models, and they realize that they can construct a comprehensive long-range parent involvement action plan but implement it a few strategies at a time. A gradual implementation process is a good way to make a positive parent-teacher collaboration happen.

But while most practitioners, authors, and researchers would agree that parent involvement is a good thing, many books on the subject merely list parent involvement ideas that teachers must then figure out how to implement. In contrast, this book gives detailed and easy-to-follow directions for creating 25 parent communication and involvement strategies. Each chapter section describes a practical strategy, provides a rationale for its use, offers step-by-step directions for its implementation, and includes sample materials that can be immediately adapted to each teacher’s situation. For quick reference, also included are strategy review checklists that briefly list the key steps to implementation. The sample materials for each strategy are varied as to age and grade level of students, type and severity of their disabilities, and instructional situation (e.g., full or partial inclusion, self-contained class, coteaching arrangement, or resource room). By personalizing the samples used in this book, teachers can create their own materials, or they can simply use the samples as resource ideas and then follow the instructions to create a document from scratch.

Additional chapter sections in the book present a collection of tips, guidelines, and suggestions for conducting conferences, making phone calls, sending e-mail, and using voice messaging.

The book is organized as follows:

Chapter 1 provides an introduction to and rationale for parent involvement.

Chapter 2 presents some beginning-of-the-year activities.

Chapters 3 through 5 explain and illustrate group and personalized written communication strategies involving both the classroom and home environments.

Chapter 6 focuses on telephone communication.

Chapter 7 includes strategies for in-person meetings with parents.

Chapter 8 provides suggestions for facilitating and encouraging home learning activities that parents can do with their children.

Chapter 9 addresses a variety of challenges to parent involvement and some possible solutions.

Chapter 10 shows how to organize materials into a parent-involvement portfolio so that you can use, reuse, and adapt these materials in the future. Teachers can also use this portfolio to document their efforts in parent-teacher collaboration, to use as evidence for professional development, and to share with colleagues whom they may be mentoring. Finally, this chapter explains how to develop a parent-involvement action plan.

You will notice that many of the strategies in this book could be considered low tech, that is, they do not require that teachers have cutting-edge technology skills to accomplish them. Rather they are all strategies that most teachers could use with their present skills and resources. That is not to say that high-tech strategies, such as creating teacher Web sites, are not useful, but high-tech strategies are much more complex and could easily be the topic of an entire book. In addition, I believe that teachers can achieve the same goals of parent involvement through less involved, less expensive, and less time-consuming means.

I also want to explain that I have used the term parent in this book in an inclusive fashion and intend for it to refer to any adult who is a primary caregiver for a child—including mothers, fathers, grandparents, stepparents, foster parents, and so on, and the full range of family profiles.

Writing this book was an enjoyable task. I interviewed a diverse group of special education teachers, all with at least 5 years of experience and a few with more than 25. These educators teach Grades K–12, in suburban and urban settings, work with students with a wide range of type and severity of disability, and teach in a variety of configurations. They shared with me some wonderful suggestions for promoting parent involvement in general and for conducting successful parent-teacher conferences in particular. These special educators are quoted throughout the text, and their useful materials appear as figures in many chapters.

I also interviewed a number of parents of children with disabilities to solicit their opinions and ideas. I am always impressed with how parents are so often able to respond to challenges and difficult situations with intelligence, creativity, energy, and grace and are able to give generously of their time despite many competing demands. The wise words of these parents (whose names have been changed to preserve confidentiality) influenced many of the ideas and strategies in this book as well.

In addition, I perused a large array of laws, standards, guidelines, and research relating to parent involvement and took the next step of operationalizing these mandates and recommendations into concrete strategies. I’m a practical, hands-on person and welcomed the challenge of translating theory into practice and trying to convert a critical but daunting task for teachers into a doable one.

I have tremendous admiration for teachers, and I hope that this book will help make one part of their responsibilities—facilitating meaningful involvement for parents of students with disabilities—more successful and a lot easier to achieve.

Acknowledgments

Thanks first to former Corwin Press editor Kathleen McLane, who helped me launch this project, which is based on my November-December 2005 article in Teaching Exceptional Children, The McClurg Monthly Magazine and 14 More Practical Ways to Involve Parents. All of the strategies in this article have been included here in greatly expanded form, and 10 more strategies have been added. It has been a pleasure to reconnect and work with Executive Editor Allyson Sharp, whose excellent feedback and suggestions helped bring the project to closure.

My sincere thanks also go to the very helpful, supportive, and professional members of the Skyhorse team: David Chao, Libby Larson, Mary Dang, Mary Tederstrom, and Lisa Riley.

I appreciate special educators Megan Aikey, Tiffany Anderson, Corey Andres, Anna Bayert, Alex Beekman, Vickie Calland, Glenda Crawford, Christy Demetry, Julie Everhart, Goldie Fraley, Tiffany Fulghum, Krista Gavarkavich, Gretchen Gossett, Chris Henry, Melissa Konicki, Monica Kreitz, Amy Leek, Sarah Miller, Terri Musser, Lindsay Reid, Sandie Trask-Tyler, Jennifer Vaughn, April Walsh, Lindsay Williamson, and Mary Zeitler, plus general educator Lynn Heward, for contributing their excellent sample materials and worthwhile reflections to the book.

I also am grateful to the parents who took the time to talk with me and share their experiences and viewpoints.

Thanks to my mother, Evelyn Dardig, for her encouragement, support, and great dinners.

A very special thank-you to my husband, Bill Heward, an expert developmental editor, for his generous and timely assistance even while he was up to his ears in his own writing projects.

Most of the letterhead graphics were obtained from clipart.com, an excellent source of images for use on personalized letterheads and instructional materials.

Finally, thanks to 30-plus years’ worth of university students, cooperating teachers, and parents who have shared with me so many creative and practical ideas.

Skyhorse Publishing would like to thank the following for their contributions to the book:

Karen Bridges

Special Education Teacher

Rosemont Forest Elementary School

Virginia Beach, VA

Erin Jones

Special Education Teacher

Tea Area Elementary

Tea, SD

Laura Peterson

Special Education, Grades 3-5

Center School

Stow, MA

About the Author

Jill C. Dardig, EdD, is a professor of education at