School/community based action

1. Project: Advancing Educational Inclusion and Quality in South East Europe / OSI ESP School/community based action Review by Njeza Mrse Montenegro/Becici, April, 2010

2. School/community based action • Purpose – initiate and support stakeholder participation (school students & parents) in advancing educational inclusion and quality at school and/or community level • Objective– help schools initiate, design & implementparticipatory action initiativesat school and/or community level • Participants - 7 SEE countries: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Romania and Serbia

3. Approach & Outputs • Approach (philosophy):Education as a process of personal & social change • Levels of expected outputs: • Intervention steps taken by country teams (ways of initiating & facilitating School Actions) • Research results (stakeholders’ needs & new understanding of the problem) • Participatory action taken (design & results achieved)

4. Implementation Steps 1. Choose generative theme & pose a problem/s that reflects main stakeholder’s concerns. 2. Select school/s & local partner/s that should be involved and establish ‘parents-students-teachers’ working group (or local network). 3.Design/realize group session/s to explore the problem & discuss possible actions to address it. 4. Facilitate participatory planning and development of the school/community action. 5. Support implementation of the action – provide financial and technical assistance to implementing teams (if and when needed).

5. Problems addressed by Actions 2 generative themes: • lack of parent- teachers communication • lack of parents participation in a school life 3 key problems (main stakeholder’s concerns): • schools have no strategy for communication with parents • existence of different barriers to efficient functioning of school-family partnership (caused by the socio-economic and cultural circumstances of the transition period) • there are no innovative models that enchance parents' participation.

6. Review of School Actions (1)

7. Review of School Actions (2)

8. Example of school action (1)

9. Example of school action (2)

10. Impacts Teachers • understood the importance of parents participation and cooperation with parents for the best interest of children • explored and tried various ways of cooperation with parents • expanded their professional competencies. Parents • understood the importance of cooperation and their role in this process that support the best interest of their children • learned how to cooperate & share responsibilities with teachers • took more (pro)active approach in the process of cooperation and explored different ways of participation • were actively involved in different aspects of school life. Students • improved their school performances and grades • opened their perspectives understanding that their problem is not entirely their own • increased their feeling of security becoming aware that somebody is paying attention to them.

11. Conclusions & Recommendations Provided by Daniela Nita (country team coordinator, CEDU, Romania) • It is absolutely necessary to set a program of written information to parents. It is possible to design a procedure that sets rules for correspondence with parents. • Parents should never be made feel guilty. This triggers defense mechanisms and results in absence of parents from school’s life. • Parents should be seen as key partners in solving potential problems with their children. • Basic step is acceptance of every parent - construction of parents–school relationship depends on this. It is essential that someone trained do the communication with parents.