Partner+With+Family+and+Community

**Dimension of Effective Teaching:** Partners with Family and Community || **Description:** Develop partnerships with families, community members and agencies to foster effective communication and to enrich students’ educational experiences. || **Successes:** I elicit student participation through a variety of instructional strategies and resources that draw from their cultures and experiences, such as tasting and responding to fruit of the Americas, visits from Dominican cocoa farmers, and participation in Hispanic Writers Week. I have also promoted school partnerships with UMass Boston, ABC Spanish in Motion, and the Peace Corps’ World Wise Schools penpal program. I regularly email and call families to communicate about student progress, and update and recruit families to participate in classroom activities using our biweekly newsletter. |||| **Challenges:** While families appear interested in our learning and activities, only one family member has come to participate in the classroom. || **Area for Growth:** Areas for growth include involving students in designing instructional activities and inviting parents and caretakers to present on topics related to their heritage and knowledge-base. || **Artifacts:** Evidence of my outreach can be seen with the family letter in my syllabus and in the photos and updates in our newsletters, all posted on this e-portfolio. Reflections on my learning: I agree with Theresa that the book list http://www.colorincolorado.org/read/forkids, including books for migrant students and books celebrating Hispanic heritage are great, and I am putting some of them on my wish-list to buy for next year right now! Since I used most of my money to buy textbooks for the sixth grade this year, I have been taking out almost all of my books for the younger grades from the library, and looking forward to adding to a permanent collection for next year, heavy on their recommended books: http://www.colorincolorado.org/read/forkids/recommended From the OELL Academic Resources website, I highly recommend the link to: [], which is more theoretical, but as a slew of great resources, my favorites of which were “Language, Power and Pedagogy” and “This Place Nurtures my Spirit: Creating Context of Empowerment in Linguistically-Diverse Schools”. As he aptly points out, “Every interaction between teachers and students can be analyzed from multiple perspectives (how effective is it pedagogically, what conception of language is implicated in the instruction, what messages related to status and power are being communicated, etc.).” and so it is not just about implementing SIOP lesson plans, but also about reevaluating our conception of language and cultural hierarchies, and thus changing our approach to our overall interactions with students and families. |||| **Resources:** List web-based resources from the sessions that supported your growth. Using electronic portfolios in the K-12 classroom as a way of communicating with families: **http://www.educationworld.com/a_tech/tech111.shtml** BPS OELL Academic Resources for communicating with ELLs and their families: http://sites.google.com/site/oellacademicresources/home || **Reflection:** These artifacts constitute evidence of achieving growth in the DOET because I have used suggested resources to increase my family communication toolkit, thinking about ways to improve the quality of interactions. I chose the photographs as documentation of partnership in action. || **Future Learning Goals:** I can learn effective ways of involving students in designing instructional activities and seek out others who have been successfully invited parents and caretakers to present on topics related to their heritage and knowledge-base. ||