I have been using the above to really help my focus in workshops with not only parents but educators, to get them on the same page.
You often hear many educators say that parents want the same experience for their children that they had in school, but I disagree. I really believe that parents want kids to have the best experience in schools, and they see their experience as the best, because they don’t know any other experience. Showing parents, and more importantly, having them experience what their kids are doing in school, can shift thinking.
If you are having students blog, why not have parents have a blogging night?
If you are promoting maker spaces in schools, have parents come in and experience the same thing?
If you are doing BreakoutEDU with your students, have them come in and do it with parents?
It is much easier to bring parents in on these experiences than ever before because these opportunities are much more participatory.
My belief is that parents want these two things for their kids (minimum); they want them to be safe and they want them to have every opportunity for them to be successful.
Yet, when I ask the question of many educators and parents, “Have you ever heard a child say that they want to be a ‘YouTuber’?”, they laugh. Why not help create the opportunity instead of squash the aspiration?
I can understand that going into some of these spaces can be scary, but ignoring them isn’t going to help. We also have to understand that our childhood is not their childhood.
Just like other parents, I want my daughter to be safe AND have every opportunity in the world. I just have to understand that the time she is growing up in looks a lot different from the time that I did.
Source: George Couros
from Connected Principals http://ift.tt/2xJc6a2
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