Your Morning Boost - Starting with a Burst: Kickstarting Parent Engagement with Shaka Mitchell

Welcome to your Morning Boost, your daily leadership advice to help you lead your school community, brought to you by AWB Education and sponsored by Grundmeier Leader Services. We're together, we are transforming education, one leader at a time. Now here's your host, Adam Bush. Good morning everybody, Happy Thursday to all of you out there. Welcome back to your Morning Boost. If you've been joining us this week, you all already know that we've been with our guest, Shaka Mitchell, as we dive into this vital topic of parent engagement in our schools. Monday, he talked about finding the goal of our goal. Tuesday we focused on celebrating the bright spots that are already working, and yesterday he got us some practical examples of how we can target the constraints. Today we're going to talk about a powerful concept and that is starting out with a burst. I'm really excited to see what he's got for us, and Shaka, it is great to have you back. So let's talk about how to get things roll. Yeah, thanks so much, Adam. I'm excited to talk about this today. So, as you mentioned, we've been kind of identifying where we might find some leverage points in our in pursuing our goal of improving parent engagement, not just for one night at back to school night, but really throughout the school year, because we know just how important that relationship is between the family and faculty. So what we're going to talk about today is starting out with a burst. Now, once you've identified some of these leverage points, what we want to do is we want to have an intense period of work with a single minded focus. That's really what it means to start out with a burst. If you are in the Silicon Valley world kind of the tech world, often what they do is they have what's called the design sprint, where you get your software engineers and other product people in the room and we say we're going to work on this one the product, and we're going to work intensely for a number of hours to the exclusion of everything else. And that's really starting with a burst. So what might that look like in the parent engagement context, Well, I want to give you some ideas one thing it might look like, especially if you've targeted the constraint and hypothetically, what we said some of the constraints might be transportation or work schedules or childcare. Well, when you think about starting with a burst for parent engagement. I think the right time to start is the beginning of the school year. Start at the beginning, right, that's not rocket science, but start at the beginning so that you set the tone for the rest of the year. One way to do this, and I saw this work at a school that I was a part of, is to do home visits. So, if you think about family engagement and if you know that you have some constraints. Again, maybe it's things like work schedules don't align and don't allow for families to come to school at convenient times, or maybe it's other younger siblings at home that can't be left by themselves. Well, what do you do if it doesn't work for the family to come to you, can you go to them? We know that most of the rest of the world now allows for on demand home delivery of nearly everything. I just saw a grocery service that Walmart will deliver groceries and will put them away for you. If Walmart can do it, maybe our schools can also do some home visits. So what might that look like. Well, if you can schedule them out and you can do a few visits each week. Then you can knock out you know, many many home visits, even for an entire classroom or home room or advisory what have you, in just the opening weeks of the school And I would say that that burst will absolutely yield just exponential benefits in terms of parent engagement for the rest of the year, because now mom and dad know that you care so much that you would visit them on their terms, on their because you care about their student. This student also now knows that you'll go to these extraordinary lengths. They'll think it's extraordinary anyhow, extraordinary lengths to come and meet with mom or dad. That's going to go a long way towards strengthening that relationship for the remainder of the year. So that's the advice for today. Start with a burst and see if you can take some kind of action at the beginning of the school year that really cements that relationship in kind of a dramatic way. Well, they're going to just lead to more and more down the road. Like you said, I think that's a great idea. Yeah, start with a burst. It's a good way to put it. Well, thank you again, this is a wonderful topic. We got one more this week Boosters, and a big thank you again to Shaka Mitchell for joining us this entire week and one more day we're going to hear what else you got to share with us as we wrap up this week of parent engagement. Again, thank you for listening. I hope you all have a wonderful Thursday is we're making it through another work week. We'll be back again tomorrow to wrap this conversation up, but until that time, thank you for listening and we will talk with you again tomorrow. You have been listening to your morning boost by AWB Education in partnership with Grunmeier Leader Services. You can find out more about our services by clicking on the links in the description. Remember, you are doing this vital job that only a few can do. So, until next time, thank you for your service to your community.