Summary:
Explores the roles and responsibilities of stakeholders in Singapore Education, including parents, educators and administrators. Examines the traditional expectations of educators and reviews how parents can contribute to the educational experience. Discusses how each stakeholder contributes to student discipline and learning.
Education is an area of great importance in Singapore. Thus, most parents have very high expectations of educators. In this paper, I will talk about what are some of these expectations and how I can harness them as a force to enhance students' learning.
The traditional expectation of an educator is that he must be responsible for the academic welfare and/or excellence of the child. Do parents also expect teachers to play a part in developing the whole person, in areas such as character development? Discipline, must then be part of character development. How much do parents agree to the whole person development? To what extent do parents want teachers and schools to discipline their children? What methods are acceptable and which are not?
Recent events shed some light to the amount of expectation there is of schools and teachers and raises some interesting questions too. The Nan Chiau fiasco for example shows the expectation of the public of school discipline and in particular corporal punishment. It is difficult to bridge the gap between those who agree to what the principal did and those who did not. They did however agree to the basic tenet of discipline but not the style. This highlights to us the changes in societal views' on methods of discipline. Do these changes in expectation restrict us in achieving our goal in developing the whole child? How do we work with these changed expectations"
Increasingly, parents are expecting to play a more active role in schools in the form of Parents' Support Groups (PSG). In these committees, they may take on different projects and be in charge of their organisation. These projects can be in the form of enrichment programmes for students which may help in the disciplining if appropriate programmes are organised.
The issues related to increased parental involvement are legion. What are parents' motivations? Will parents expect something in return for their services? What kind of incentives can school offer to encourage parents to participate? Will it lead to inequity? Parents might feel that if they do not contribute as much, their children will be disadvantaged. Will they then see the PSG as an added workload to themselves? Will it disadvantage those students who come from a poor family background"
Methods to harness them as a force
There are some possible solutions in the bid to harness parental support as a force. Schools can 'package' the services that parents can offer. Since parents have different strengths and resources, they can contribute to schools in various ways, such as financial aid, time or talent. When seen in this way, parental support can be of great value to schools.
In order to encourage greater participation in the PSG among parents, schools will need to market them. Schools need to be careful not to promote elitism by valuing certain skills above others. They need to ensure that parents do not feel that their contribution is insignificant. How can these be done? One proposal is that schools first identify the school's and parents' needs and then communicate and match these needs. On a volunteer basis, parents who feel they can help may come forward to contribute.
Schools can also explore the possibility of forming parent-parent groups instead of parent-teacher groups. This is to give greater autonomy to parents and to allow for self-regulation and organisation. It also saves teachers from extra responsibilities.
As for questions pertaining to the organisation of the PSG, it has been suggested that cluster superintendents run them, so that they can come up with a model for the cluster of schools, instead of individual schools coming up with their own models. However, the drawback is that cluster superintendents are not at ground level, they do not really understand the actual situation of each of the individual schools. Different schools might have different needs, strengths and weaknesses with regards to parental support, willingness to be involved and resources that they can contribute. Cluster superintendents may then not be a good person to deal with the PSG.
Principals have also been identified as a possible person to do the organisation. However, constant changes of principals make it difficult to establish a strong PSG. Also, there is the perennial problem of principals being overloaded with work.
Beyond all these issues, we can see that it is important to harness parents' expectation as a force to enhance student learning. In involving parents in school in various enrichment and discipline committees, parents will have some degree of control to meet their own expectations.
This is the complete article, containing 749 words
(approx. 2 pages at 300 words per page).
