The Parent Project: A Workshop Approach to Parent Involvement - Softcover

Vopat, James

9781571100016: The Parent Project: A Workshop Approach to Parent Involvement

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1571100016 ISBN 13: 9781571100016

Publisher: Routledge, 1994

Involving parents in their children's schooling is a matter of intense concern in North America. Teachers and administrators want to construct a program that creates positive involvement. This is especially critical for Chapter I schools that are mandated to use a portion of their funds for home-and-school programs.

Jim Vopat believes that parental involvement should strengthen the link between home and school, and to achieve this goal parents need to be introduced to the revitalized school classroom. The Parent Project calls on the most powerful aspects of school reform--workshops, journals, cooperative groups, shared reading, agenda building, interviewing, goal setting, and critical thinking-classroom learning strategies experienced by children every day. When parents work with these strategies, they understand them and discover how to support them.

Using a workshop/process model, parents become involved with their children's classroom activities and are thus empowered to support their children's education. These workshops ensure participant ownership of a program's overall agenda while providing long-term structures for support and continued development.

The Parent Project:Provides a framework for implementing ways to get parents involved and informed.Was developed in urban bilingual school settings and includes workshop formats in Spanish and English.Is a complete source-book for teaches and principals that provides materials for conducting workshops with parents in areas of writing, reading, self-esteem, and community-building.Supports your efforts with a detailed description of what the workshop approach is and how it functions.

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About the Author:

James Vopat (Ph.D., University of Washington), founder and director of The Milwaukee Writing Project, teaches writing and literature courses at Carroll College, and is co-author of What Makes Writing Good. An advocate for nave art, Jim has organized major exhibitions of children's writing, drawing, painting, and sculpture. He is a faculty member of the Walloon Institute, the Michigan-based summer program for teachers, and is currently a Senior Fulbright Scholar in curriculum development to Sri Lanka.

Review:

Absolutely the best workshop approach to parent involvement I've ever seen. -- Teaching K-8, August 1997

The Parent Project explains how the workshops involving parents were set up and conducted. Included in the descriptions are samples of work done by parents at the workshops and samples of student work. How to begin a parent involvement project, how to structure workshops, developing a three year plan and evaluation of the workshops are all explained in the book.

For any educator looking to increase the effectiveness of parental involvement, the Parent Project will be a welcome resource. -- Rethinking Schools, 1996

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