Action Research Report

My action research project is to increase parental involvement on our campus with our special education students, which will hopefully also increase their effort on their classroom work and improve state test scores. During the first week of school, a parental involvement action research team was established. This team consisted of nine members, including special education teachers, paraprofessionals, diagnosticians, and administration members. We have set meeting dates occurring every second and fourth Tuesday of each month. During our first team meeting, we all discussed, worked on, and agreed upon a common goal for the group. Our paraprofessionals and other staff members that could or will work directly with our parents/guardians were trained before and during staff development on some of the techniques to use when working with parents. During the second meeting, we identified a list of students for our program. We chose a varied of special education students, including mainstream, those in the inclusion setting, and resource setting. All through September, the team compiled a call list of names and phone numbers for these students. Parent information was gathered from the students, View Student Information (VSI), and Skyward. We are currently in the process of calling and inviting parents to come spend half or an entire day in the Content Mastery Center where they can actually work with their kids and see what happens day to day at school. We are hoping to find that getting parents involved in their child’s education, not just for extracurricular events, will have a positive impact on classroom work, grades, and state assessment results.

Web Conference Reflection

I think that the web conferences are great! However, I was unable to attend any of the conferences during the EDLD 5326 School Community Relations class.  I did find that being able to view and listen to the recordings of the conferences was very beneficial to me. I felt better knowing that all of my questions regarding the reflections, logs, and assignments  were also questions of my classmates. Another big help during this course for me was the “Facebook” page. I appreciate whoever runs and updates that page.