Competences of teachers in cooperating with parents: A literature review It is not always easy for teachers to cooperate with parents. The competencies considered necessary for such cooperation are mostly described in general terms and the range of training programs, courses and handbooks on offer to support teachers in this field is broad and not very specific. In order to be able to substantiate these competencies and identify gaps in the present knowledge concerning parent-teacher cooperation a review study has been conducted. This study provides an overview of the international literature on teacher competencies needed for cooperation with parents. Results show that both the number and the quality of the sources found are inadequate to substantiate the competencies necessary for teacher-parent cooperation. Analysis of seven articles considered relevant to the subject provides insight into which knowledge, attitude and skills (competencies) contribute to a fruitful teacher-parent cooperation.
The experiences of beginning and experienced teachers in parent teacher contact Beginning teachers struggle during their first years, which is shown in the number of beginning teachers that leave the profession. 25 percent leaves within five years. This is worrying, as there is a lack of teachers. Beginning teachers experience multiple problems, such as high workload. Which is largely caused by parent teacher contact. In this study, the relation between the amount of work experience in primary education, and the positive or negative experiences with parent teacher contact is studied. Interviews with primary school teachers from six elementary schools in the Northern part of the Netherlands are conducted by the method of storytelling, which is a form of narrative inquiry. Ten beginning teachers and ten experienced teachers were selected. Through these interviews, multiple stories were found, which were coded inductively and deductively. Content analysis showed some differences between beginning and experienced teachers. Beginning teachers seem to feel more insecure than experienced teachers, caused by their lack of experience and having no children themselves. Thereby, beginning teachers feel less appreciated by parents than experienced teachers do. However, similarities between beginning and experienced teachers are many times as large as the differences. Beginning and experienced teachers have the same ideas about cooperating with parents. Both see a decrease of teacher authority and an increase of critical parent attitude. Both experience many support of their colleagues or coach at work.
Sarah Banks (2012) describes ethics work mainly as the effort people put into developing themselves as good practitioners. She discerns six aspects of ethics work: identity work, framing work, reason work, emotion work, role work and performance work. Although ethics work focuses on the ethical development of individual practitioners within their profession, the concept and all its aspects can be transferred into an ethical guideline for the collective development of practitioners in interprofessional cooperation. As such the concept of collective interprofessional ethics work can also be used as a set of criteria for the ethical evaluation of interprofessional cooperation, as is shown on the basis of an experiment in Belgium
Bullying at school is an emotionally charged topic that significantly tests the relationship between parents and teachers. It is a sensitive issue as it directly relates to the child's upbringing at home. Furthermore, parents and teachers have differing perspectives on the child, and the strategies they adopt to curb bullying are based on different perspectives and spheres of influence. In recent years, a variety of measures have been implemented in order to combat bullying at primary schools. Many different anti-bullying programmes have been developed for schools and a wide range of methods, training courses and tools are available to help teachers work together with parents in order to optimise their child's educational development. However, all of these anti-bullying methods lack concrete advice and tools to help teachers work together with parents whose children are personally involved in an incidence of bullying, despite experts across the board agreeing that cooperation between parents and teachers is of vital importance.The goal of this project is to develop an effective strategy to facilitate cooperation between parents and teachers that can be employed in the event of bullying as a supplement to existing anti-bullying programmes. This consortium's ambition is to boost the social safety of children in primary education by applying expertise in the field of bullying and parental involvement, and by combining past experiences.
