Your Morning Boost - The Goal of the Goal: Unlocking True 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 welcome back to your Morning Boost. Happy Monday, everybody. I'm your host, Adam Bush, and I'm here with a special guest. Today. We have Shaka Mitchell. He's a senior Fellow with the American Federation for Children and Shaka, I'm super excited to have you on here. He's going to be here all week. He's going to be really focusing on one of the most important relationships in the students' education, that is that partnership between parents and schools. As please give a big welcome to the show, Shaka Mitchell, Thanks for joining us today. Thanks so much. Adam, I'm really excited to be with you and share a little bit about parent engagement this week. We know that it's a super important factor in the success of all of our students, regardless of what type of student, regardless of the age of student or the type of school. We know that the links between families and the school faculty is really really important, and so I want to talk about how we might increase and improve parent engagement this week. I've got a couple tips, and my disclaimer is that what I'm going to be doing is applying a framework that was recently written about in a book by Dan Heath, and I've got a book I'm going to show you. The book is called Reset, and I'm not getting any kind of kickback from it, but I think it's a super helpful tool. And so I want to talk about a few of what Dan Heath calls leverage points and then a few ways to restack resources. And today on Monday, we're going to talk about one of the leverage points. Finding a leverage point is all about uncovering a place where with just a little bit of effort you can yield portionate result. Okay, so we're going to try to find a leverage point. So let's say it's the beginning of the school year and one of the things that you and your school are thinking about is how do we get higher attendance at our back to school right Maybe it's a meet the teacher, Maybe it's that week where you're coming in your kiddos are coming in and they are meeting their teachers or learning their schedules, what have you. How do you boost attendance? Well, one of the leverage points that Dan talks about is identifying the goal of the goal. And what that really means is you're digging deeper to see, well, what's really beneath our goal? Because you might imagine that hypothetically if you said, well, our goal is to increase or improve attendance, Well, you could do that in a number of ways, but they might not all be meaningful. Right, So, for instance, if you wanted to have really high attendance at your school one evening, you could have a carnival, say, but the carnival doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to yield great results that last the duration of the school year. Right. People might just come out because they like cotton candy or they like carnival rides. I would certainly come out for that, but that doesn't necessarily mean that I'm going to be engaged in my kid's homework, you know, come October or November. So what's really the goal of the goal? And I would suggest that in this case, the goal of the goal, when we dig deeper the goal of the goal really is parent engagement because we know that that with parent engagement, when that link is strong between the parent and the teacher and you're on the same team, then a student knows a few things are true. One, they know that I've got a group of adults that are in my corner, a group of adults that has my back, whether or not I'm struggling, whether or not unsuccessful, this is a team that's behind me. They also know that I probably can't sort of pull one over on one side or the other, and that's really helpful too. If you're a faculty member and you know that a mom or dad is aligned with you, and they know what's going on, and they've got a direct line to you, then it means that it's far less likely that a student can tell one side one thing and one side the other. Right that link is strong because the communication is already there. So what I would say the first step to higher parent engagement is really identifying that as the right goal. So not having a vanity metric as something like higher attendance as a goal, but say, okay, engagement is what we're shooting for. So for the rest of the week, we're going to be talking about a few more of these leverage points and then going to close out the week talking about restacking some resources to get you on your way to improving parent engagement for the rest of the school year. That's awesome. Goal of the goal, goal of the goal. That's really good. I like that part. I'm really looking forward to what you're going to do for the rest of this week. That's going to be awesome. Thank you for joining us today. Everybody again a big welcome to Shaka Mitchell this week as he comes and gives us some leadership tips and insights on how we can improve parent engagement. I'm really excited to hear what else he's got to share. Otherwise, have a wonderful Monday. Thank you all for listening. We will talk with you again tomorrow. You have been listening to your morning boost by AWB Education in partnership with Grunmeier Leader Services. 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