School and family are educational agents with great influence on the formation and development of the child’s personality. The partnership concluded between the school and the family is an active relationship resulting from rights and duties with the common goal of ensuring the intellectual and emotional comfort of the student. The family is the primary educational factor. It provides the child with the necessary socio-emotional climate, but also the first intellectual or moral notions. The way of life of the family is the main landmark in the child’s life, the parent being his first model.
The family’s responsibility increases with the child’s entry into school. The attitude of the student towards the temple of learning depends largely on the attitude of the parent. That is why parents must be drawn together with the school, together with this institution delegated by the community to transmit a set of values through which to produce learning. The student needs to feel that the parents are with him, that they are interested in what is happening at school.
The school, in turn, through the head teacher, but also through the class council, has the obligation to know the family conditions of each student. Specialists in psychopedagogy believe that there are several types of families that the head teacher should have the authority and means to counsel. The strict family is the one that emphasizes discipline, order, seriousness in educating the child. It does not accept corporal punishment as a form of coercion. Parents have the patience to explain, guide, advise the child.
The permissive family believes that the student has only rights, not duties, and that he is allowed anything. The children of these families have a hard time adapting to the demands of school and society in general. The rigid family, due to the lack of trust in the child and the fear of failure, is a follower of a system of strict rules that must not be broken. In this way it harms children’s development by limiting freedom of expression and action. The libertine family, through complete lightness in the relationship with their own child, prevents his maturation. Due to lack of time or other reasons, he transfers the entire responsibility for the education of the student to the school.
Children who come from families that recognize the important role of education are more confident in their own strength, more willing to get involved in school activity. The others are, most of the time, unmotivated or disinterested. The educational partnership between school and family becomes effective when the parent’s involvement is permanent and not only when learning and discipline problems arise. The main forms of collaboration between the school and parents are: lectures with parents, meetings at the school or class level, individual conversations between the principals and each individual parent,
the participation of parents in various extracurricular activities (excursions, celebrations), or even training parents in arranging the classroom. Parents should also be involved in making other decisions regarding the smooth running of the school. Ideally they would be consulted on school curricula, assessment guides, electives, timetables or extracurriculars. Thus, the school-family partnership would become a form of communication, collaboration and cooperation in support of the child, in the action of shaping his behavior.
Professor Nina Elena Plopeanu
Tags: Effective schoolfamily collaboration educational partnership
