Join us as we discuss the importance of building and sustaining partnerships with parents, carers, and community groups to enhance student learning opportunities and outcomes.
Join us as we discuss the importance of building and sustaining partnerships with parents, carers, and community groups to enhance student learning opportunities and outcomes.
Our guests, Professor Ruth Jeanes, Caitriona Dempsey, and Hayden Owens, share their expertise and individual strategies on how they engage and create meaningful relationships both inside and outside the classroom.
Ruth discusses the significance of community within schools and shares her extensive background working with various organisations and groups; while Caitriona offers practical strategies for engaging parents and carers, emphasising the importance of ongoing communication and collaboration; and Hayden shares the importance of cultural sensitivity and understanding working in a school with students and parents from non-English speaking backgrounds.
Together, we explore:
Join us for an insightful conversation on the power of partnerships and the important role teachers have in building and sustaining these relationships with the aim of enhancing student learning outcomes.
Special Guests:
Professor Ruth Jeanes Head of School, School of Curriculum, Teaching & Inclusive Education, Faculty of Education at Monash University
Caitriona Dempsey Primary Classroom Teacher - Government Primary School, Melbourne, Victoria
Hayden Owens Student Wellbeing Coordinator and Physical Education Teacher - Noble Park English Language School, Noble Park, Victoria E: hayden.owens@education.vic.gov.au
If you’re enjoying Let’s Talk Teaching, don’t forget to subscribe, rate and review! You can follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, and share your thoughts on the show by using the hashtag #letstalkteachingpodcast
If you’re interested in hearing more about the short courses, undergraduate, and postgraduate study options that Monash Education offers, please visit Monash Education's learn more page.
Access this episode's transcript here: https://lets-talk-teaching.simplecast.com/episodes/creating-strong-partnerships-with-parents-carers-and-the-community/transcript
This podcast is recorded on the land of the Boonirong people of the Eastern Kulin Nation.
We'd like to pay our respect to Elders past and present
and acknowledge that this land was stolen and never ceded.
Welcome to Let's Talk Teaching, the podcast created by teachers, for teachers.
I'm Associate Professor Rebecca Cooper, Director of Initial Teacher Education at Monash University's Faculty of Education
and I'll be your host for this series.
Our aim is to create a conversational series that's informative, engaging and relevant
to your teaching practice.
Joined by academics and teaching alumni from Monash University, we'll be exploring the
challenges, issues and experiences you might be facing in and out of the classroom, drawing
on their personal experiences to provide you with valuable insights into the world of teaching.
In today's episode, we're discussing the importance of building and sustaining strong
partnerships with parents, carers, community groups and organisations to enhance student
learning opportunities.
With us today to share strategies on how they create these meaningful relationships are
Professor Ruth Jeans, Head of School for the School of Curriculum Teaching and Inclusive
Education from the Faculty of Education at Monash University, Katriana Dempsey who is
passionate about building relationships with parents and putting this into practice day
today as a primary school teacher in Victoria, and Hayden Owens, who has a unique set of
challenges and a great perspective on working with students and parents from non-English
speaking backgrounds as a student wellbeing coordinator and PE teacher at Noble Park English
Language School in Victoria.
Thanks everyone for being here tonight and Ruth I'm going to start with you. How did
you originally get involved in working with communities? What was your interest?
I guess I've always seen those connections
with communities and the essential part of education.
So, you know, it's the part that makes education real, really,
and connecting to that real world.
And I've just always seen it as an essential part,
I guess, of the education experience,
sort of seeing what's happening in local communities,
tailoring what you're doing in that space,
in education with what's happening in your local area.
I guess I sort of personally connect with it
in relation to my specific field,
which is sport, physical activity,
and physical education.
And just really seeing that for that
to sort of engage young people fully in physical education,
you have to understand what opportunities
they have in their local community,
what resources are available to them,
and really tailor to make that experience meaningful,
and also to provide them with experiences
that they can carry on in sort of their everyday lives.
So I think that's always been my kind of broader perspective.
and then with my own work in initial teacher education,
just looking at how to connect with community groups
and bring those into the work I do in the university
and within the classrooms here.
So one of my units, I have a partnership
with an organisation called Valara,
a disability organisation,
and we work very closely with them
to bring a sort of experiences,
real life experiences from the community
in with our pre-service teachers
really kind of shape their experiences and bring the kind of practices to play from,
from those community groups can kind of bring in, in terms of real world experiences, I think.
So that's sort of been, I guess, my main connection to community, but I'll hand over and
allow others to sort of share their experiences. I'm happy to jump in. Go for it Hayden. I guess,
in a way, I met Ruth probably five or six years ago through university. She was one of my
lecturers I think. And I guess at that time I probably didn't understand the importance
of community etc. So going into my role at a language school, so we work with refugees
and migrants and through that role I think I've learnt and developed my understanding
of the importance of community in engaging the multicultural community within school and
outside of school.
Okay, so you said there that there's something that happens in school and something that
happens outside of school. What does it look like in school Hayden?
Well, there's a range of reasons we would engage parents or community.
So community organizations, we have strong partnerships with,
especially if you're newly arrived students, so refugees or migrants,
I guess informing them of certain things they're going to need to know in Australia
in a culturally sensitive manner. So we work closely with, I guess, targeted organizations.
For example, we've got a lot of Afghan students, so we have a lot of Afghan
community organisations that come in and they can deliver information in a very sensitive way to parents
in a way that's going to really help them assimilate into the country
in a very new environment that they've just arrived in.
And what does it look like in your school, Katriana, working with the community and working with parents?
Yeah, so similar to you, like we're very much in school with our community.
We have a lot of like extracurricular groups that come to our school,
So opportunities for students to have, say, chess classes or dance classes or art classes
after school or during lunchtime. We have connections with those types of groups.
I personally don't have as much involvement with organizations and things like that as you might.
But we have a lot of, like, vertical community between all the teachers because in a primary school
we can work with anybody in the school one year to another year. So we really know
who everybody is and I think that's really nice.
Is there much parent involvement at your school?
(laughing)
I feel like your secondary.
It's primary and secondary.
Oh, primary and secondary.
But yeah, with primary, they're always in the yard.
My classroom this year as well is like windows all around.
So beginning of the day, end of the day,
you see them around and you chat to them,
you say hi to them and you talk about their kids
and how their life's going and things like that.
So you really kind of build, you know,
there's relationships quite early on
and you see them so often as well.
And they say, you know, like it takes a village
to raise a child.
So a lot of times when we talk to parents,
it's, you know, what's going on at home
and you know, what can we do to help your child at home?
What are you doing as well at home?
That's similar to what we're doing at school.
So your child's getting the same message across the board.
Yeah, really nice.
That's very similar to what we do,
But we, almost a step before, we've got to educate the parents on the Australian education
system as well.
So I guess the expectations in other countries might be different to schooling expectations
here.
So we often find initially that parents are a bit standoffish.
So we have these kind of induction parent meetings on Friday afternoons where the principal
comes in and explains the Australian education system, what the expectations are, and educating
parents on how they can support their kids at home.
So whilst also educating the kids, we're also trying to educate the parents to build
that relationship because we know that that's what we need to support the students to progress
at school.
That's great.
You mentioned before things outside of the school as well.
What does that look like?
What does that entail?
Yeah, so this is, I guess, we've got a heap of kids with trauma background.
So we're linking students constantly with external organizations, counseling services.
We work with great organizations called the Centre for Multicultural Youth that link with
sporting organizations or they run free sporting training sessions after school, which really
does support students from refugee migrant backgrounds where the costs of signing up
for a soccer club are in the thousands of dollars.
but we can link those families to a free session of training
through a different organization after school.
So they really, organizations really help us
in keeping the students engaged outside of school as well,
which can impact their learning at school.
might help connect them to some sort of community
sporting activity or something like that.
And so Ruth, that comes back to you
about that importance of the broader community
and connecting with schools and having pre-service teachers
understand that role, why do you think that's so important?
with pre-service teachers, I think it's a really important
sort of skill to have in terms of going into teaching
and knowing that ability to just be able to see
what's in the local community, who to connect with,
how to connect with, and to sort of make those links.
And just as Hayden's talked about,
have that sort of support wrapped around where, you know,
might need particular services to support you young people. Having those relationships can
make that so much easier but I think that doesn't sort of happen overnight and it's a skill that
we need to support pre-service teachers with developing so that they see how to kind of make
effective partnerships and how to sort of better utilise those to support the young people that
they're with and really I think it's sort of two ways as well as the teachers and schools
but also community groups coming in.
And again, I know sort of in my specific field of sport,
what Hayden was talking about,
just working with clubs that are wanting to do more
within their local community
and encouraging them to connect with the schools
and to come in and look at, you know,
what can they offer schools and coming in
and offering that in sort of time to build that bridge.
You know, it's not easy for young people
to transfer across different services.
So actually just having those connections
It just feels like an extended part of the school.
I think it's really, really important.
Yeah. And I'd say as a pro service teacher, it's kind of the best professional development
I've had since leaving university was working with external organizations.
Now, from a PE perspective, you know, people that come in and run a soccer clinic,
you pick up drills that you can reuse, um, you know, engaging the multicultural community.
There's certain terminology that these external agencies use, um, that, you know,
I've never thought about and you kind of put that into your own practice.
So, yeah, I would advocate to any pre-service teachers to really think about how you can use,
I guess, external organisations and when you do get into a school, kind of advocate to your
PLC leader or your leadership to try and work with as many organisations as you can.
What does a really productive partnership look like? What does it, what does it entail when
it's working really well? Like when people can trust each other and you can rely on someone,
you know, you can reach out to them as well. Like, I know today we had an incursion with kids
where a police officer came in and talked about cyber safety.
And so this is like a different type of community.
Like when they leave school and become adults,
how do they interact with the world as well?
And, you know, the police officer said that anytime you need help,
you know, you can contact us.
This is how you can do it.
This is how you can see us.
And I think it's important for kids to feel comfortable with knowing that
even when they're adults, how to connect with the community as well.
There's sort of a number of things in terms of the part,
The idea of a partnership is sort of a reciprocal relationship.
So it's sort of thinking about if again,
if I go back to kind of Willara and the relationship I have there,
it's about what do they want as an organisation
out of the partnership?
What do we want for support with the pre-service teachers
and kind of negotiating that and being upfront about that
to make sure that everyone's sort of got their expectations laid out.
And then really sort of good communication between the two.
And I think the key thing for me certainly is that
with a good partnership, it's not a one off,
it's not just to kind of come in, do this,
deliver, off you go.
It's an ongoing relationship we build,
we work out each year how we're gonna improve
the unit that I'm teaching and what do we want
to add in extra and get feedback on that.
So it's got that real sort of sustainable element.
And I think it's through those relationships
you build over a long period of time
that you really get the most out of that work
with external organisations and really start to tailor what you need for the young people
that are involved in them?
Yeah, I would agree with that.
Just to, I don't know, maybe something that Pre-Tourist Teachers might want to think about
is, and from my experience with the multicultural community, there's a lot of things you've
got to take into consideration when you are engaging external organisations.
So we've had agencies that have come in before in the past and the program hasn't really
been tailored to support, you know, multicultural students diverse needs.
So one thing we always, we always explain to the agencies is, you know, we're going
to have interpreters there.
So when you are delivering to our students, speaking short, sharp sentences, pause,
let the, let the interpreters translate.
And then that obviously impacts the length of the session.
So often agencies might say to us, well, we can't do it in that time.
So it's all, I think it's about being flexible as well.
But we always hear that's one of the main things that we always want to inform the agencies that they will be working with some really diverse kids with low levels of English.
And that needs to be considered and also taking culture into context as well.
Examples they might use might not be relevant or you know might not be appropriate for certain cultures.
So there's a spot about finding a balance.
So we always have a pre planning meeting with the organizations is to explain as what has been said.
what we want and what they can, what we think we can build as a partnership.
Yeah, and I like that sense of communication being just so important, both between you
and the external organisation, but also then thinking about the flow on effect of that
communication to your community and outward to the community as well in terms of what
you're sort of saying that this external partner can bring in, you know, that there's
that sort of circle of communication there that's being generative.
I also want to become something you said before about your professional learning, about what
you're taking away from this as a teacher.
Could you speak a bit more about that?
Yeah, just the examples I gave before.
So, I mean, early on in my career when I was teaching PE, we would look to bring in, you
know, if we were doing a sport that we weren't too familiar with, we'd try and bring in external
organisations to run clinics.
And it doubled as great for the kids because they're learning off real experts in that
sport specific area.
And at the same time, it doubles as professional learning.
So that's kind of from, I guess, a PE perspective from what I said before as well with the example
of, I guess, from a wellbeing perspective, bringing agencies in to support families and
students.
We're learning about things that I can't deliver on like introducing Centrelink to the parents.
That's something that, you know, I'm not privy to all the information on that, but learning
off of those presenters allows us to, you know, have that conversation with parents and
and try and link them in with the relevant agencies further down the track.
I was going to say I found it interesting what you said with the cultural background
of your school because our school is quite similar.
We have a lot of EAL students.
We have a lot of parents from so many different countries, so many different backgrounds.
And I feel like our school community, the relationship we have with the parents is really
strong, even to the point where we had just before Ramadan, we had two parents come into
the school and they came to one of the staff meetings and they said, "We know our children
are going to be fasting this Ramadan.
There may be other children in the school."
So we're here to answer any questions you might have about Ramadan, any, you know, thing
you're not sure about what the kids can and can't do, you know, the history behind it,
just so you're aware of our culture and what the children are practicing at school as well.
And they provided resources and books for us and I thought that was really good.
It's nice that it's not just us going to the parents and telling the parents what's happening
But the parents that come into the school and saying hey, can we let you know about us and that was really nice
Really good sense of actual community there
Let's take a quick break stay right where you are because coming up next our guests discuss professional learning
opportunities in this space and some challenges and strategies for building parent and community partnerships in schools
You interested in furthering your career?
Explore our range of postgraduate and short course study options at monash.edu/education/learnmore.
If you want to be part of the conversation make sure you join us on Twitter @monasheducation or share this podcast with a friend or colleague.
So let's get back into it.
So what do you feel perhaps that are some of the challenges with working with parents and community and partnerships?
Yeah, I think with primary school kids, similar to how you say you have parents who come from
overseas and they're not sure about our schooling system, in primary school, if it's their first
child who's come to school, it's a similar type of thing. They don't really know what
to expect. Things always change since when you were in primary school to now when their
child is in primary school and what the kids are expected and what things are happening
in the school, extracurricular activities and things like that. I think sometimes it's
hard with parents who think that their child is the most precious angel on the planet and
having to tell them that maybe not so much. Maybe we need to change some things here or
there. Maybe we need to have a chat about this or that, make sure there's consistency
of messaging from home and school so that the child is not getting confused. But like,
I've only got rules at home for this. I've got rules at school for that. When they're
so little they can't really differentiate between the two.
So really trying to communicate with parents and be like,
"Oh, maybe you need to do this at home with your child.
Please read with them every night type of thing."
You know, how do you work with parents in that way
to support them?
before something bad happens.
So like just sending little handwritten notes home or just calling up and say,
"Hey, you know what?
Your child did a really good job in their writing today.
I saw such an improvement."
And you follow up throughout the year as well.
It is hard to make contact with all the parents.
Like I said before, they're like, "We do have parents that come to us first."
So that makes things easier, of course.
But yeah, maybe if there's a parent of a child that I've never seen before,
rather than seeing for them, for the first time at ParentEach interviews, I might just
call up and be like, "Oh, by the way, just noticed your child did well in this today."
Although I find it easier to write a note rather than be on a phone call, but I have
like, yeah, these pre-printed notes where I can just tick a box saying, "They did well.
They helped somebody.
I'm proud of your child.
You should be too."
And then send that home.
And I show the kids that they know.
and just building that relationship with the parent first before maybe something bad happens.
Yeah, okay.
So really setting it up and establishing it so that it's there.
What about you Hayden?
What might be some of the challenges you face?
Number one is the language.
So yeah, we have to put a lot of things in place to communicate with parents so all our
permission forms are translated into the main, I guess the most common languages we have
at school, yeah, phone calls home, probably can't just come from the teacher themselves,
so we're calling through one of our multicultural education aids, and they're not always available.
So there's a few intricacies at our school in having to communicate with parents, and
I think it's really important that we do make that effort to ensure that I guess we are
equitable and ensuring that the parents are understanding everything.
There's no point in us sending a permission for home in English.
That's not informed consent.
So yeah, there's a lot of steps that we've put in place to work with parents.
I guess before the steps you were talking about of sending a note home, I mean,
we would normally have to consider that, get it translated or Google translate.
If you're talking to a parent, is your best friend and what does a translate option on
one note, which is pretty accurate.
So we often often use that when we're communicating with parents and students as well,
while they're developing their language skills.
I'm curious.
Do you, seeing as you're at an EAL school,
do you have like translators on the call? Yes, yes, so we have, they're called multicultural
education aids and they're employed by the school within the department and basically
they're employed for the most common language languages. So at our school it's Dari for
Afghanistan, Vietnamese, Chinese, Burmese, Ukrainian and then if there's a language you can't get
there's a great service called Language Loop and you kind of dial into your phone and they
fine and interpret pretty quickly if we need. So yeah it's a little bit of work but yeah
it's worthwhile when it pays off to build that connection.
Yeah so Ruth what about working with community partners what can be some of the challenges there?
I guess it's you know it's time consuming it is a lot of effort you have to I think for all
we've been talking about is a lot of effort what you're talking about country only with
investing with the parents I see you know at my own child school just how much effort
the teachers go to to connect with parents and keep us all informed and it takes time doesn't it.
So I think the time required can you know, educators are all so busy and it just becomes
another thing on top of that to really develop those productive relationships. And I think as
well it's sort of that's what we were talking about earlier as well as making sure that the
partnerships we're creating are beneficial for everyone involved and sometimes they're not and
sometimes you sort of have to move away from working with a certain organisation or a certain partner because
it's not the right fit or they're not sort of providing the experience you'd hoped for the
people that you're involved with. So that can be really difficult as well, sort of disentangling
yourself from it. But I think the main thing is there's so much positive that can come from these
relationships and that connection with the community. And if we sort of think of schools in
in particular as being potential community hubs and having so many resources that are
valuable to that community. But that does take effort, it takes leadership, it takes
negotiation to really make the school that hub and allow the kind of community in in
a way that's all a kind of, I guess, an additional sort of extra that educators have to take
on board. Yeah.
From what I'm hearing though, you all think it's worth it because at the end of the day,
all for the kids, for the students and that's sort of what we're all there for.
But there's got to be an influence on the learning here for the students.
What do you see as the influence on the students from these sort of connections?
You've talked about a lot about supporting the parents and supporting teachers with the
professional learning and that sort of thing and building the sense of community.
But what is it for the kids?
What do you think is the real benefit for their learning here?
I think for me in primary school, a lot of it is behaviour rather than academic.
I had parents reach out to me early this year and saying, "Can we have a meeting with you?"
Because our child is on their iPad till midnight or 1am.
So can we come chat to you just to talk about our problem and our child, we think she's
going to come to school every day tired.
What can we do to kind of fix this situation?
we had a meeting and then I sat down with a student the next day and I was like,
"Look, Mum and Dad are worried about this.
What can we do so that you can come to school, you know, bright and ready to learn?"
So that was really nice to, you know, have that conversation with the parents and
then have that conversation with the student and see the changes as well.
Oh, really nice.
Yeah. So, I mean, our data at our school definitely shows the impact that working
with community groups can have.
So we probably have a range of community groups
that we work with in a proactive way
that are kind of constantly within our school.
And that's students, I guess, introduced to them
throughout their time at our school.
And then we also use organizations reactively.
So we notice the students disengaging,
attendance is down, and we've talked to that student
and there's a lot of pressures coming from home
and they're not doing anything after school.
so we might link with, okay, all right,
let's try and, let's get your attendance up
and maybe we can try and organise something outside
of school for you to connect with.
So we use community organisations in two ways
and we definitely see that it impacts engagement
and learning for the students.
teachers as well as kids in schools,
but where do you see the benefit for kids in schools, Ruth?
I do think it's that sort of, it's that different perspective
that a community organisation or an outside group can bring.
So it's a sort of different form of knowledge and different form of learning.
But I mean, depending on who is.
So if you say of working with a first nations organisation coming in,
it might be a whole sort of heap of knowledge and information and sort of rich
kind of culture that was not previously available and that students can really connect with.
So I think it just broadens the variety of knowledge available and gives open to different
perspectives that can really help students tune into their sort of learning experience as well
and give them different views and see themselves in different ways as well that make it really
meaningful and make them feel like they belong. So yeah and I think we've as I said before we try
and engage culturally appropriate organisations and the power of a student seeing a role model
in their community coming back to talk to them is really powerful for the students to
engage them and show them that there's someone that was in a similar position to them, they
just arrived in the country and they're coming back from Banga University student talking
about their possibilities.
So that's one example of something we do constantly at our school.
We try and bring them back, I guess alumni of our school or students that are from that
community that have come to the country as a migrant and now they're really excelling
in what they do and then we also have people that come in that kind of left school early
but are really successful in owning their own business and give students, show students
the I guess the range of opportunities in Australia because I'd say 99% of our students
that come to our school want to be doctors or engineers and realistically that might
not happen.
So we try and educate the student and the parents as well because the parents have obviously
sacrificed a hell of a lot to get them here and they want them to strive to their best
and become doctors as well, but our job is to educate them on the other options and other
possibilities in Australia. Have you got a nice example of someone that's been back
recently that's been a nice success from your school? Gosh, we've had quite a few. I mean,
there's a really successful business owner that's kind of, I think has also come back and almost
supported some Year 10/11 students with work experience. So that's kind of the connection
there. And we've had students that have come back that have gone on to do engineering and they've
have spoken to some of those students that are looking to get into that and we also have
students come back talking about a range of jobs and range of possibilities and giving
them advice on just what they did when they were in their position at school and what
advice I'd give them.
That's really powerful.
That's amazing.
Really, really good.
So what sort of advice could you give to a teacher in a school who was looking to make
either stronger connections with local community or with their parent community.
What advice could you give them?
I think with the primary school, with connecting with parents, don't be scared to reach out to them.
There are instances where I know there have been parents who may be a bit scary
towards teachers, but if there is a parent who comes on too strong,
always, you know, go talk to your team leader, go talk to the assistant principal, go talk to
the principal, get support for that as well. I know that there has been incidents in our school
where one of our teachers felt very confronted by a parent who just came into her classroom,
but you know, she came and she talked to everyone, her team, she talked to the principal and things
were done about that. So if things do escalate, don't worry because you do have a team to support
you and you don't have to deal with it alone but please always go out reach out to parents
so that you can build that relationship and that connection with them and that helps also build
a connection with the students. Thanks Katara, that's really nice. Hayden what advice would you give
to a teacher who was looking to reach out a bit more to the community? Yeah so I guess I'll talk
from my context working with refugees and migrants in the ESL community sorry. I guess as a pre-service
teacher more likely than not you are going to work with students from you know you speak
a different language at home and I just advocate you know not to see that as a barrier so just
because it may be a parent doesn't speak English doesn't mean they're not invested in you know
wanting to find out how their child is going so you know talk to your leadership team talk to
your principal in ways in which you can try and support that communication whether it's you know
using a language loop or a translating service to communicate with parents but yeah just um yeah
they're very interested to and they're very supportive of their children they might not know
how or know the I guess the the cultural norms of coming and approaching teachers but that doesn't
mean that we should um you know not reach out to them as well so that would kind of be my advice in
in engaging the AAL community. Yeah I think I'll sort of come at this from the community
organisation perspective so um I think as a teacher it's really about thinking you know what
what do you want to get from the connection? What are you hoping? How do you hope it's going to
enhance the educational experience and sort of using that as a starting point and then kind of
working out well who might be good that's sort of again locally connected is likely to be able to
have some sort of sustainable relationship with the school and also I mean I think as teachers we
get a lot thrown at us in terms of potential partnerships and potential organizations wanting
to come you know everyone sort of I'll come and do this I'll come and do this program that program
So being happy to sort of navigate through that and sometimes also saying no, like now actually this isn't the right fit for what I want, isn't the right fit for the school.
This is what I need and this is the right organisation to do that.
So I think being happy to kind of invest some time in establishing who's going to be the right organisation to work with is actually really important and not sort of feeling that all these people want to do things.
I should do it because this is automatically a good thing.
It's not, you have to be selective about who you work with.
a lot of agencies that approach us
is often reviews on their website or there's feedback online.
And I know I haven't done it,
but in the past teachers have kind of,
if a school's left to review,
they've called that school just to kind of get more feedback
'cause sometimes if you actually filter down
and read the reviews or the number of reviews,
it's not, you know, that might not be all it seems.
So, yeah, I'll just double check as well to cover yourself
and to make sure that the students are getting
what we want out of it.
you do have a little bit of an idea of what you want or you know there's an area of needing
your school, where can you start looking? Where's an idea to sort of start?
I guess it depends on kind of what you're after. Often, you know, the team at school
with you will have ideas, your fellow colleagues will sort of, "Oh yeah, there's this group,
that group." I also think as well sometimes reaching out to parents can be really helpful
in sort of, "This is what we're looking for. Does anyone have any sort of contacts connection?"
again using your immediate community. And then I think, you know, I sort of, I approach local
government about certain things, see if, again, depending on what sort of a rafter, often local
government can be a good source of advice on these agencies or these groups. But I think it's
certainly is a lot of its word of mouth, so sort of your own colleagues and then
colleagues at schools locally as well, and just sort of sharing that information. It does seem
to me that's sort of the best way I think to connect with the right people in the right
organisations.
Any final thoughts from anyone tonight?
I think it's interesting like with your communities like how you're talking about like picking
and choosing and finding the right fit which I think is really interesting with parents
it's not quite.
No, you can't pick and choose.
I can't pick and choose that.
No.
It'd be nice.
It'd be nice.
No, but yeah.
So we've just got to like really be listening and trying to be open and understand.
and then we just have to take what we've got
and do what we can as well.
in terms of the work you do to try and connect
and try and make those foundations,
like that must sort of pay dividends when issues do come up
that you have that relationship.
you're like, "Hi, can I have a meeting?"
You're like, "Ooh."
(laughing)
But on the other hand, you're like really happy
that they're comfortable to reach out,
that they know that you are there as well
to support their child.
And I do, again, like just from a parent perspective,
it's such a relief to be able to know when there is an issue
to be able to just go and chat to the teacher
and that that's okay, you know,
and to know that the groundwork's been set,
that that's all right, that kind of communication's fine
and just pop in and say,
"Oh, this is just a bit of a, could I have a chat with you?"
And to know that that's fine
and you'll get listened to, I think it's really important.
Sometimes I'm on a phone to a parent
and you're just like, mm-hmm, yeah.
I see it, that's very difficult.
It's almost like a therapy session.
Yeah, absolutely.
It's interesting as well what you were saying
with the example of the child on the iPad as well
and the sort of seeking advice beyond,
I guess what you think is your sort of parameters
and remit, you know.
oh, my kid's doing this behavior at home.
What can we do to stop that?
Yeah, what's the stress?
Oh, okay, let me have a think.
Well, this is what we do at school.
You could try to do that at home.
Might be a bit different, but yeah.
No, it certainly extends out.
Yeah.
The role.
Yeah, and sometimes you get presented with situations.
You're like, oh, I never thought I'd have to deal with this.
(laughing)
Yeah.
Well, thank you all so much for this fantastic conversation.
this evening, it's really so wonderful to hear about the way you're all
establishing relationships within school communities and external to them
and bringing that together to really support and nurture kids in their
learning. So thank you all very much for your time. Thank you. Thank you. Join us
next episode for our season finale of Let's Talk Teaching where we discuss
teacher identity with Dr. Michelle Ludicke and alumni Andy Greville and Gary
Prasad. Andy is an early career teacher and Gary has recently retired after over 30 years
in the classroom. Along with Michelle's academic research, Andy and Gary will be sharing their
diverse perspectives on the evolution of their teacher identity and what it means to them.
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