Page 23 - The Inquiry into the Development and Implementation of a Multimedia Resource to Help Improve Parental Involvement in Their Child’s Reading Literacy During the Primary School Years.

‘Parent Learning Zone’ is to share our understanding of this complexity with the

parents through instructional videos and to empower them to use a range of teaching
methods and reading strategies to help their child become a confident and fluent

reader. I have used this literature to help guide and focus the design and context of
my resource and applied the five main components of reading as the primary subject

matter of the videos.

2.4 Empowering Parents and Involving the School Community
As the literature suggests, parental involvement is central to a child’s academic

progress and reading development, it is therefore important that schools implement a

framework or model that allows for this involvement. A flexible framework that
suits both parents, pupils and teachers should be chosen keeping in mind that a

framework that works for one school may not necessarily work for another. I will
now examine some of the more well-established models and frameworks and discuss

how our school has implemented some of these methods in the hope of empowering

the parents to enable them to become involved in the school community and
essentially their child’s reading homework.

Today parents of school children in most countries are now expected to have an

active educational role in comparison with previous generations. The emphasis on

parental involvement has now shifted from ensuring ‘parental rights’ to encouraging
‘parental responsibilities’ in supporting their children’s education (Whitty 2002). As

Gill Crozier concludes, ‘whether parents or teachers like it or not, parents are part of,
even central to, the education strategy’(Crozier 2000, p.9). Parents are expected to be

educationally involved in a number of different ways within the school community.
Castro et al., (2015) considers parental involvement as the active participation of

parents in all aspects of their children's social, emotional and academic development.

However, with the wide variety of duties parents can undertake to support their
child, there is a growing need to determine what parental actions are most effective

in increasing student academic achievement.

One of the most widely employed and cited models among existing frameworks for

the introduction and development of parental involvement in schools is Epstein’s Six

14