Your Morning Boost - Targeting the Constraint: Overcoming Obstacles to Parent Engagement

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, where together we are transforming education, one leader at a time. Now here's your host, Adam Bush. Good morning, Happy Wednesday, and welcome back to your Morning Boost. Out There Boosters. This week we are with our guest, Shaka Mitchell, as we dig into the vital topic of parent engagement in our schools. On Monday, he talked about finding the goal of our goal, and yesterday we focused on celebrating the bright spots, the things that are already working. Today we're going to get some more practical examples to engage our parents. So Shaka, it is great to have you back. Let's talk about some specific strategies parents and schools can use. Hi. I'm doctor Lisa Hill, a longtime educator of nearly forty years as a teacher, counselor, professor and vice principal, and I've seen just about everything public schools can throw at you, and now I'm sharing my tales on my comedy podcast, Vice Principal Unofficed. It's where school leadership meets laugh out Loud stories from underwear required, parent teacher conferences yes really, to staff launch confessions and more. You won't believe I'm telling it all with humor and a whole lot of heart. I also tackle the serious stuff too, like what schools really need to change and those behind the scene moments no one talks about. So if you're ready to laugh, learn, and maybe even cry a little, but mostly laugh, join me and my ninety year old mom my unofficial co host on Vice Principal unofficed. New episodes drop bi weekly on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast picks. Trust me, this is one detention you'll actually look forward to. Thanks Adam Well. Today's strategy on hump Day is going to be to target that can strength, and by way of reminder, I am pulling some of these strategies from a book that was recently written by Dan heath is called Reset. Here's the book, and today's like I mentioned, is targeting the constraint. Well, Targeting the constraint is all about identifying where in your system there might be a bottleneck, or there might be a primary constraint, maybe on two three things that are really holding you back. Now we've been talking about our goal. Of the goal here is to improve parent engagement. And so the thing we want to ask is, well, what's keeping parent engagement low? What's suppressing parent engagement? So I want to give some really practical examples. These are some things that you might identify in your school community. And let's say what we're talking about is a lack of parent engagement and maybe it being back to school season, maybe that's evidencing itself in low numbers at a back to school night or meet the tea that sort of thing. Well, let's think about what some of the constraints might be. Transportation. Think about whether or not transportation is a factor that's sort of suppressing the attendance that you've got at your back to school night or even your engagement throughout the year. If it's challenging for parents to make it from wherever they are to your school, that's something that that's a constraint that you that you might target, you might identify and see, think how do we tackle that one. So transportation, that's especially true if your school is in a low income community right where people's transportation may not be as reliable, whether or not it's their own personal transportation or its public transportation, So that might be one another thing, work schedules. Far too many schools and school districts try to improve parent engagement by welcoming parents to the schools at hours that are really really inconsiderate of things like work schedules. So on the one hand, it makes sense that the school might be open from say seven thirty until three thirty. On the other hand, most parents are working during those hours, so that's going to be really problematic, and that might be a major constraint when you're thinking about how to improve family engagement and parent engagement throughout the school year. If you're if you're constantly having things at say ten thirty am, well that's a little bit inconsiderate to families who need to be at work and maybe don't have control full control over their schedules. That would be a major constraint. The last constraint that I'll mention, and again, these are going to differ for your individual school and your community, and so you want to target whatever that sticking point is in your own school community. But the last thing might be childcare, especially for fanamilies who have kids who are say toddlers, or you know, under the age of three, it might be really really challenging for them to make it out. If they are navigating sleep and nap schedules, if they're trying to find sitters or additional folks to watch their children so that they can come in for a whole night at school, that's going to be a big factor. So is that something that you can maybe even offer if that's your constraint, Maybe you can offer childcare at a back to school night to help improve family engagement. Again, when we're targeting the constraint, the whole idea is that you're going to look for what one, two, maybe three unique obstacles are in the way preventing you from getting to the goal of the goal, so that you can tackle those things. You're not tackling everything at once, and hopefully you're going to see family engagement increase and improve over time. So the biggest thing I heard you say right there is it is individual. It's not a one size fits all for every school. We can't just throw a blanket statement out there. Everybody needs to do this. It's going to take a little bit of time for us to truly understand what our unique needs are for our district and then try to figure out how to tackle those I think that's a really great message today. Well, thanks again. This has been a wonderful start to the week. We're halfway through. It's a big Wednesday for everybody and I can't wait to see what we've got for two more days this week. I really appreciate mister Mitchell coming on your Morning Boost. Thank you listener for listening to us, and we will talk with you again tomorrow. 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.