Collaborating with Parents on Goal Setting for Children

Early childhood education is preferably a collaboration between families and schools whether they’re Kindergartens, Pre-Kindergartens, Preschools, Day Care, Sunday Schools or other organisations. Goal setting for children can be a helpful way to ensure attention is paid to areas of need or interest for each specific child.

For some free goal setting sheets for children read through to the bottom.

So whose responsibility is it to set these goals?

• the child’s?
• the parent’s?
• the teacher’s?
• society’s?

Whose priorities are the most important?

This post is a mix of findings from a research article* and my reflections on it.  The research compared parent-teacher collaborative conferences with native English-speaking parents, bilingual Spanish/English speaking parents and native Spanish-speaking parents in the US Head Start program.

I am Australian and therefore no expert on Head Start. However, it’s my understanding that developing partnerships between teachers and families is a high priority, particularly in the care of at-risk children. To be honest, this has been a priority in all early learning centres I have worked at, whether in Australia or overseas. So although this research is focused on low income, linguistically diverse, families I believe it raises issues that are applicable across the early childcare industry.

It raised many questions in my mind, the largest being:

How much do teachers talk?

Look at the graph below. The darker blue line shows the amount of time teachers spent talking during these ‘collaborative’ meetings. Keep in mind that with Head Start teachers and parents are supposed to work out the goals together. (I’m not sure how much child-input is expected).

Ouch! We talk a lot! And the less English parents speak, the more we talk.

Now check out the brown line. How much did mothers talk?

Native English speakers got some air-time, but it drops significantly with a language/cultural divide.

Fathers

Interestingly, Spanish-speaking fathers managed 2%, but English-speaking fathers only managed 0.6%. Perhaps it was just a result of small numbers in the study, but I must admit that in my own experience mothers generally have more to say in parent meetings than fathers, regardless of cultural background. Is that a weakness that we should be addressing? Are our communications, expectations and meeting times unintentionally excluding fathers from these conversations? Does it matter? Or should we be addressing this issue?

If you have been successful at increasing father input please write one of your strategies in the comments.

Goal setting

Take a look at the green line. It shows how often a teacher provided the child’s goal for the following semester, which was then ‘accepted’ by the parent. For a supposedly collaborative effort the numbers seem way too high, 40% for English speakers and 73% for non-English speakers.

Then we add the purple line. This line demonstrates the teacher asking the parent’s opinion but then prompting them in certain directions until the parent comes around to the goal the teacher wants for the child. When we add the two methods together we’re seeing that a large majority of the goal setting is essentially being decided upon by the teacher.

You may have noticed in the graph that these percentages can go over 100%. I’m simplifying what these numbers represent for this post so please don’t take the numbers too literally – just the overall effect.

Now the blue line. This depicts a teacher genuinely asking parents to suggest a goal they feel is important for their child. And waiting for an answer.

• 27% for English-speakers
• 3% for Spanish-speakers
• The bilingual parents have no difficulty with English which suggests that teachers are altering their expectations for cultural reasons as well as just linguistic difficulties.

Collaborative goal setting? Maybe not… but why shouldn’t we make our opinions clear?

Let’s face it. Teachers are good at goal setting. We know our children. We care for our children. We want them to be as successful as possible and we have a good grasp of the skills, knowledge, behaviours and attitudes that will lead to success.

After all if we visit our doctor or accountant we’re probably going to do exactly what they suggest, so why not follow the teacher’s opinions in education?

As we can see from this study most families do, many by default. And what is the problem with this?

Buy in

Or more correctly, lack of buy in.

Sure, we’re with children for hours every day, but they’re at home longer. And the home influence will carry through with them to adulthood, it’s the one constant. When you think about it, early childhood teachers are an important part of children’s lives for a short time, but then we’re gone.

And if we have not truly involved parents in their child’s educational journey our influence will soon be but a distant (hopefully fond) memory.

We know what we want for the children in our care, but what about their parents? No matter their languages, cultures or economic status we want the children in our care to have parents who:

• Believe they can be an integral and positive part of their child’s educational life
• Understand how children learn in general, and how their own child prefers to learn
• Want to develop a positive relationship with their child’s teacher each year
• Understand the goals of their particular school system, and what avenues they have to ask questions and gain information
• Understand the importance of supporting their child’s first language at home (including reading and writing if possible)

Why are parents so important?

Because they are the ones encouraging, reminding, prodding and helping their child day-after-day and year-after-year. Parents need to feel empowered and capable to do this.

To be their child’s greatest advocate.

 So what can we do?

Goal setting is important

• It gives us a focus.
• It helps us plan and strategise.
• It increases accountability.
• It helps us see progress, or a lack of progress, over time.
• It makes us look deeper into what is most important.
• It’s a life long skill that we want children to acquire and take ownership of.

Doing some goal setting?

I’ve created some goal setting sheets and a poster which are free to download called Let’s Set Goals! Some of them can be seen below.

How do you feel about parent-teacher meetings? Have they been valuable to you? Why or why not?

I wish you happy teaching and learning.

Research Article*

Cheatham, G.A. & Ostrosky, M.M. (2013). Goal setting during early childhood parent-teacher conferences: A comparison of three groups of parents. Journal of Research in Childhood Education. Vol 27: 166-189. DOI: 10.1080/02568543.2013.767291