What's New
Tuesday, November 14, 2006
"Principals" of Community Engagement
Today, more and more principals “get it.” That is, they know that in order to help young people succeed they need the community — to help them engage families, to share resources, and to meet standards. However, knowing you need to do something is not the same thing as knowing how to do it. Never fear, help is at hand.
The Coalition for Community Schools, based at IEL,worked with principals in rural, suburban and urban settings across the country to learn about community engagement from the ground up. Their new report, Community and Family Engagement: Principals Share What Works, tells the story. It identifies six keys to community engagement, and the strategies and approaches used by effective principals. Read the report here.
The Coalition’s next step is to develop a network of leaders of principal preparation programs — individuals who want/need to better understand community engagement and the principal’s role in it. The network will think about how to prepare principals who are successful in engaging the community, and will share best practices and lessons learned with preparation programs around the country. If you would like to know more about this emerging network and body of work, please contact Amy Berg at berga@iel.org
Why should principals lead the charge for community engagement? With the rigorous external acountability imposed by NCLB, don't we ask enough of our school leaders already? Isn't their job to effectively manage their school? Do we ask doctors to engage the public with matters of public health? Most certainly not. Furthermore, aren't community leaders (e.g. activists, clergy members, or local politicians) in better positions to bring the necessary disparate groups together? Finally, from a behavioralist perspective, aside from symbolic public relations motivations, why would a principal care to add such an enormous additioanl burden onto an already over-filled plate? Basically, my point is that the relationship might work best from the community TO the school, not the other way around.
By 
, at
6:06 PM
The new CCS report is very well-designed to enable the lessons of successful community schools to be useful across other schools. However, my experience as both a public school teacher and a public school parent tell me something is missing in the "Engaging Staff" section of the report. It seems to me that one of the most powerful outcomes of parent engagement is the trust that is built when parents and teachers are engaged together over matters of teaching and learning. If parents help raise money for a field trip or come in to help laminate pictures for a bulletin board, teachers may feel supported. But when teachers invite parents to become engaged in serving as authentic audience members for student performances, to come in and conference with students about their writing, or to experience the math instruction that is being taught to their children, they develop trust in the competency of the teacher that can help the teacher feel supported in a much deeper way and that can work to benefit the student. In addition, to the extent that this type of parental engagement makes the teacher's practice public, it serves to put a little pressure on teachers and help hold them accountable for the quality of their practice. I imagine this type of engagement focused on teaching and learning is happening in successful community schools. I would have liked to see more documentation of it within this report.
Jill Harrison Berg
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10:31 AM
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