Your Morning Boost - Studying the Bright Spots: A New Approach to 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. Welcome back to your Morning Boost. Everybody. Happy Tuesday out there to all of our school leaders and educators out there making a huge difference every day in our kids' lives. Our focus this week is on parent engagement and we are so glad to have our guest back with us again here on Tuesday, So please welcome back Shaka Mitchell, a senior Fellow with the American Federation for Children. Shaka, thanks for joining us again. We are excited to continue our conversation about how we can empower parents and strengthen our schools. Well, thanks so much Adam for having me back this Tuesday. I'm excited to continue the conversation about leverage point in how how we can help faculty get to better parent engagement this school year. So yesterday we talked about identifying the goal of the goal, and we said that our goal of the goal wasn't just higher attendance at a preview night or back to school night, but it's really parent engagement today. The leverage point that I'm going to talk about is studying the bright spots. Okay, so by way of reminder, a leverage point is where we're trying to find a place in the life of our school where we can assert just a little bit of pressure and impact, but it can have an outsized effect. That's a leverage point. So we're going to study the bright spots. Studying the bright spots is all about identifying places or situations conditions where things are working really well. And from my experience in school leadership, I know it's easy to get in a room sometimes and talk about all the things that are not going well, especially if we're talking about family engagement. Maybe we think, oh, while attendance here was low, or I'm not getting mom or dad to call me back as i'd like. Well, in this case, we want to flip that on its head and we want to talk a little bit about what is working. I would say, look around your school calendar and try to find different spots when you do have really high attendance and engagement. What are the conditions for success? Then? Right, are you offering something at the school that makes it really attractive to draw people in. Are there other things that are being provided, you know, whether it's by the school or by some other organization that are making those conditions easier for parents to get there. Here's the last thing that I'll mentioned that it might be a little outside the box, but are there other organizations in your community that do this really well? Right? So, if there are organizations in your community that already seem to have really high parent engagement, what are the things that they're doing well. Where I live in Nashville, Tennessee, we are members of the YMCA, and the YMCA does a great job of putting on programming for families in our community. If I was a school leader, I might reach out to some folks who are working in community engagement at the YMCAA to see what they're doing that we might be able to import into our school community. Right. That would be finding a bright spot in my community and bringing it in. What you want to do is you want to think, well, again, how can we replicate those conditions so that the bright spots that we find can be applied more broadly. The last thing I'll say is that if you are part of a school district or a network with multiple schools, identify the school that's already got the strongest parent engagement, and again that's your bright spot. So don't focus on the things that you know are not working in your school context. Figure out which one of your peers is doing something really well. And my experience, just like it's the case with this podcast, is that great educators want to connect with other great educators, and we want one another to succeed. We're happy to share ideas. If there's someone at a school nearby, regardless of whether or not it's in the same district or it's a public, charter school or private school, if they've got strong parent engagement and you've heard that, reach out to them and see what's working for them. What are those conditions. Sometimes something is easy as changing the time of day is all it takes to improve your engagement, maybe even the day of the week. So that's the second leverage point for this week. We're going to talk about one more and then a few more ways to restack resources for the rest of the week so that we can improve parent engagement in your school community. Where is your kid headed after high school? We are from carpool to college. Two accomplished educators, college and career consultants and parents. You've guide families through the entire journey from freshman year planning to senior year's success. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, that's good. So focusing on the bright spots. You're right. We unfortunately in education, we typically look at the negative. We look at the things we're not doing well. But focusing on a strength is a great idea. I also like the idea about reaching out to a community. It's not just the school. We're all in that same boat of getting people engaged. That's a wonderful idea. Well, again, thank you for joining us on a Tuesday. We got more. We got more coming up this week and I'm excited to hear what else you have to share with us. Thank you listeners again. I hope you have a wonderful Tuesday. Go out there and make a difference like you do every single day. We appreciate your time on your Morning Boost. But again, thank you for listening. We will talk with you again tomorrow. You have been listening to your Morning Boots 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.