ABU DHABI // Agnieszka Deegan, a soft spoken woman with short red hair and black spectacles, held up a blue workbook. "So this is the ministry book?" she asked, clasping the Ministry's of Education's Grade 1 Arabic text in her hands. The teacher of the class, Mona el Saleh, nodded at Mrs Deegan, whose three children are students at the Gems American Academy.
Mrs Deegan and a few other mothers had come to the school Tuesday morning hoping to harness the power of parent involvement in the classroom. The workshop was part of an initiative launched this week by the school's owner, Gems Education. Formerly Global Education Management Systems, the company is the country's largest operator of private schools. During the session, parents took part in a short mock lesson and worked with the English-speaking Arabic-reading assistants who help their children.
The mothers leave with a better understanding of how they can help their children with Arabic - a subject they all say is particularly difficult because they, too, are new to the language. "I'm trying to support my son's learning," said Judith Fjellstedt, a stay-at-home mother from New Zealand. Research over the past few decades has demonstrated that what goes on in the home is important to performance in school. A 2007 study commissioned by the Department of Children and Families in the UK concluded that when schools, families and community work together to support learning, children perform better and stay in school longer. The study, by Prof Janet Goodall and Prof Alma Harris of the University of Warwick, found that there was a strong link between parental involvement in education and achievement. Several other studies have concluded that high parental expectations result in higher marks. In his 2009 book, Visible Learning, which analysed the results of thousands of studies on student achievement from around the world, Prof John Hattie of Auckland University found that the classroom teacher makes the biggest difference in student achievement, but that parent involvement was also important. He reported that students were most successful when parental expectations and aspirations were high, followed by parental engagement with the child with homework and other responsibilities. Gems is hoping to put the results of such research into practice with a push, across all 25 of its schools in the UAE, to involve parents more deeply in their children's schooling. It has hired Wendy Berliner, a former editor of the Times Educational Supplement in the UK and a veteran education reporter, to create a long-term strategy that will be deployed across the 70 schools in their network worldwide. "Remember that a parent is the first teacher," Mrs Berliner said. "The longest lasting teacher a kid gets is the parent. It should be the best teacher, actually." Parent engagement, Mrs Berliner stressed, is not a matter of simply being involved with the operations of the school, or volunteering, or serving on something like a parent-teacher association. "Involvement", in the vernacular of education policy makers, can mean simply attending parent-teacher conferences or other activities at the school. But "engagement", in this context, asks parents essentially to serve as co-educators - to become active in the lessons themselves and to reinforce at home the teaching that took place at school during the day. "We have superb teachers in Gems but they cannot be there all the time and, as a result, they can only do so much," Mrs Berliner said at the launch of the initiative on Sunday. "Parents need to play their part as educators if children are to be the best they can be. "Parent involvement is a good thing - we have parent 'friends of school' groups, and we do much to get our parents involved with their schools, but this initiative is a much needed extension of that." Mrs Berliner noted that Gems was not the first school group to promote parental engagement. "It's been done in different parts of the world, generally in disadvantaged areas and the results are always good," she said. "I want it to be much more personal. I want our teachers to be skilled enough to teach parents how to carry on teaching at home. Not teaching formally but asking the questions that stimulate a flow of conversation." klewis@thenational.ae