Your Morning Boost - Tapping Motivation: The Key to Lasting 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 and a happy Friday, everybody. Welcome back to your Morning Boost. I hope this has been an awesome week and look forward to wrapping up this week. As this entire week, we've had a great pleasure of speaking with our guest, Shaka Mitchell, a Senior Fellow for the American Federation for Children, and he says been talking about this crucial topic of parent engagement in our schools and giving us a lot of tips and tricks. It's just been wonderful. Started this week by getting into the heart of the matter and finding the goal of our goal, then shifted our focus to celebrating the bright spots and how we can start with a burst. We talked about that yesterday. A lot of great stuff. If you missed any episode this week, I highly encourage you to go back and check those out it well. I promise you it will be worth your time. Today He's going to bring it all together going to synthes side what we've learned to this clear actionable path for parents and schools to form this powerful and lasting relationship. Chocot's been a great week. Really appreciate you being here. Let's go and wrap this up and give our audience that clear path. Forward you bet well. Today, what I want to talk about as we think about improving parent engagement, not just for one night, but really for the entire school year, is I want to talk about how we tap motivation. This is what you might think of as the Tom Sawyer recommendation for the week. If you think back to Tom Sawyer most of us hopefully you're familiar with that story. But think about when Tom Sawyer is painting the fence, the picket fence. He's supposed to be painting this white picket fence, and what does he end up doing. He ends up convincing his friends that painting the fence is not only desirable, but it's so desirable that they should pay him for the privilege of doing it. Well, how did Tom Sawyer do this? He does it by tapping motivation, right. He decides to see what's attractive about this about this act, and he pairs that with the motivators for his friends. In this case, his friends were motivated by doing something that they thought was going to be fun and that was limited. You know, there's only one paint brush, and they thought, oh, well, if there's only one, I guess it must be this really desirable kind of limited niche thing. And so they said, well, how do I get in on that? And he said, well, you're going to have to pay me the price. Next thing, you know, they paid the price to do his chores. Now hopefully you're back to school night or meet the teacher knight is of much higher value than painting the white picket fence. But nevertheless, you want to think about how to tap the motivation. So when you're thinking about parent engagement, it's important to think, well, who else cares about this? And why do they care about this? Why should a parent or even a student care about coming and engaging in after school or even before school hours. So I want to give a couple of ways that you might identify these things. The idea is that change is easier when it aligns with what people want and they naturally care about. So why don't you think about this from a student's perspective? Why would a student want increased parent engagement? Well, a student might, especially if they're younger, because students really want to tell adults about their lives. They believe students really do care when we take an interest in what they're doing. Right, So students probably want to tell you about their hobbies. They probably want to tell you or even show you their pets at home or what have you. So if you were thinking about from our last episode on Thursday, thinking about doing a home visit, well, why would a student care about that? Because they would love to show you their space and their turf and show you what's going on in their yard. Many teachers have probably never seen that, and they would love to show it to you. Why would a family Why would a parent rather care about increased engagement? Well, you've got to think what's going to motivate them many parents, I know this was the case for me. We have yet to find the parenting book that has all the answers. So parents are also looking for a friend in this process. They're looking for someone from whom they can get some advice. So they would probably love to partner with you to say, hey, here are some things that I'm seeing at home. I'd love to know, teacher, what you're seeing in the classroom and how we can work together. Parents are often looking for allies. So if you think about reframing parent engagement not as something you need from them, but frankly as a service that they're going to get from you. Right and now, this is they're getting an ally and they're getting a partner in the parenting process. That might be the motivator and the reframing that they need to engage more deeply with you throughout the school year. I really think by tapping motivation, we can make things like parent engagement not feel like a burden, but feel like indeed something we are adding to the whole school experience. So much better than just giving out trinkets and things like that. I love that idea. That's awesome advice Shaka. Thank you so much for joining us this week. This has been such a valuable conversation. Before I wrap this up, where can our listeners find you and learn more about work you do? How do they get in contact with you? Yeah? Thanks so much, Adam. I love being able to share a little bit and I hope that some of these tips are helpful to all the educators listening folks can follow my writing and other things that I'm recording on substack. So if you go to Shaka's substach, or you can go to Shaka Mitchell Sahaka Mitchell dot substack dot com, or you can go to Federation for Children dot org and you can learn more about what we're up to around the country. All right, awesome, Well again, thank you for taking the time and joining us this week. It's been tremendous. I really like your message you got here, and I'm hoping may will get a few more schools out there with a little better parent engagement. I know that's always a goal for everybody, so thank you for helping us achieve that goal. And a big thank you to all of you listeners again. I hope you've had a wonderful Friday, and I hope you have an even more exciting, better weekend ahead of you. You certainly have earned it. One more time. Thank you Shaka for joining us this week. Thank you listeners for joining us as well. We will talk with you again next week. You have been listening to your Morning Boost by AWB Education in partnership with Grunmeyer 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.