Involving your community in curriculum design
This resource contains information, examples, and ideas that you can apply to the needs of your school and community to support designing your local curriculum.
Tags
- AudienceSchool leaders
- Resource LanguageEnglish
About this resource
When approaching school-based curriculum design, the involvement of your school community is crucial. This resource is divided into three parts: information, examples, and ideas. Each of the video stories is accompanied by questions and resources to stimulate professional learning conversations amongst your staff.
Involving your community in curriculum design
- Before you begin
- Implementation – Where to start?
- Sustainability – How do we continue the initial momentum?
- Longevity – How can we make this a permanent part of the school?
Before you begin
What does community engagement currently look like in your school? You could examine the engagement of your community in the following areas:
- design and review of the school curriculum to best meet the needs of the students and community and to be inclusive and culturally relevant
- enrolment procedures
- different approaches to engaging parents, whānau, and the community in children's learning
- setting homework and seeking support for the homework programme
- your approach to parent-teacher meetings
- reporting processes
- accessing resources or information from parents and the community or creating them together
From your review, how would you rate your current level of community engagement? What are your next steps?
Implementation – Where to start?
“The key strategy that (the principal) used to begin this (community engagement) process was to call in an expert on educational thinking to talk to parents at an evening meeting. His decision to use an outsider was quite deliberate, as he felt it needed to be someone who didn’t have ‘everyday relationships with parents’, but who could present powerful ideas, research, and arguments. He wanted to ‘unsettle’ and ‘shake up’ parents’ present-day ideas about education, and to alert them to good reasons for change, because, without this, he believed there would not be buy-in to the notion of parental input. His strategy seemed to pay off. After the well-attended meeting, he said parents came out of the hall saying, with a sense of urgency: ‘We’ve got to do something. When are we going to start?’” (Community engagement and The New Zealand Curriculum, 2014, p. 6)
How does your school gather and use information about the needs, wishes, and aspirations of parents, whānau, and the wider community?
Implementation needs to move at a pace that suits all parties. Start with a vision of what you, as a school, want for your curriculum. Ask parents and students what their vision is. Where are the commonalities? Clarity around the purpose of a school-community partnership is crucial, as are repeated opportunities for community members to engage with the curriculum and its values and principles.
School stories
This collection of stories shows ways that schools have successfully implemented community involvement in designing their school curriculum.
Staff, students, parents, and the community were fully involved in the planning and writing of a school curriculum that reflected Renwick School and its place in the community. It is evident that parents, students, and staff all feel ownership over the document and its implementation.
Reflect on your own school context
"Curriculum is designed and interpreted in a three-stage process: as the national curriculum, the school curriculum, and the classroom curriculum. The national curriculum provides the framework and common direction for schools, regardless of type, size, or location. It gives schools the scope, flexibility, and authority they need to design and shape their curriculum so that teaching and learning are meaningful and beneficial to their particular communities of students. In turn, the design of each school’s curriculum should allow teachers the scope to make interpretations in response to the particular needs, interests, and talents of individuals and groups of students in their classes." (The New Zealand Curriculum, 2007, p. 37)
- What is unique about your school and your community that needs to be included in your localised curriculum?
- In what way has your community been engaged in the thinking around your school curriculum?
- In what way have your students been engaged in the thinking around your school curriculum?
The staff, board, and whānau at Te Kura o Hiruharama went through a process to identify their priorities. This digital story explains the process and outcomes of this exploration and how they have transferred into the life of the school.
Reflect on your own school context
A productive partnership in education means a two-way relationship leading to and generating shared action, outcomes, and solutions. Productive partnerships are based on mutual respect, understanding, and shared aspirations. They are formed by acknowledging, understanding, and celebrating similarities and differences.
A productive partnership starts with the understanding that Māori children and students are connected to whānau and should not be viewed or treated as separate, isolated, or disconnected. Parents and whānau must be involved in conversations about their children and their learning. They need accessible, evidence-based information on how to support their children’s learning.
- What are the priorities of your whānau for student learning? How could you find out?
- In what ways are whānau involved in their children’s learning at your school?
- In what ways do whānau contribute to curriculum and strategic decision making at your school?
- What opportunities do whānau have to share their knowledge and expertise within your school curriculum?
- Can you harness community knowledge and expertise further?
- Once you have a relationship with whānau how do you embed and sustain it?
Matakohe School worked together as a community to redesign their school curriculum. Through listening to the values and aspirations of everyone, they have developed their own graduate profile with a set of competencies for all students to In what ways do you work with your community to share aspirations, values, and ideas for teaching and learning at your school? Can you recognise opportunities to invite more community input?
Resources
School partnership self-audit tool:
- How do you gather and analyse information about your school’s community to gain an understanding of different strengths and gaps that need to be filled?
- How can you consider the quality of community-school interactions?
This tool, while not strictly curriculum based, will encourage you to examine community engagement in a wider school context, including the gathering of evidence and how data is most effectively used.
Developing strong community engagement
"It is the school‘s responsibility to reach out. It is not the parents' role to initiate partnerships. Partnerships should be normalised as just being part of what the school does, and every teacher is expected to do them as part of their normal classroom practice across the whole school from years 1–13. Partnerships should be integrated with the school's priorities."
A summary of the work of Joyce Epstein, including an action plan to help sustain community partnership in your school.
Sustainability: How do we continue the initial momentum?
"The purpose of school-home involvement is to connect in-school and out-of-school learning in ways that will support valued outcomes for students. If effective connections are to be developed, teachers need to value the educational cultures of their students’ families and communities, and parents need to learn about and value the education culture of the school. The principle of ako — reciprocal learning and teaching – is therefore fundamental to developing connections that work." (Robinson, Hohepa & LLoyd, 2009, p, 150)
How will you ensure that engagement with parents, whānau, and the wider community is sustainable and always evolving?
Sustaining a vision and process can be harder than implementing them. What are your expectations for parental involvement? How have these been fulfilled? Creating sustainability is about re-examining those initial expectations and making sure they are realistic and achievable for everybody. What do your parents and whānau understand about pedagogy, assessment, and reporting? Effective decision-making and meaningful collaboration are difficult if one party is less informed than the other. Using in-school experts would be useful for this.
School stories
This collection of stories shows ways that schools have successfully implemented community involvement in designing their school curriculum.
Greater community engagement and enhanced student achievement are two of the outcomes of Pomaria School's journey to create sustainable curriculum design and review. In this story, parents and teachers describe whānau engagement at the school and how whānau voice is used to create directions for learning.
Reflect on your own school context
The School Leadership and Student Outcomes BES found that the most effective home-school partnerships are those in which:
- Parents and teachers are involved together in children's learning.
- Teachers make connections to students' lives.
- Family and community knowledge are incorporated into the curriculum and teaching practices.
The Family and Community Engagement BES found that the most effective partnerships:
- Treat families with dignity and respect and add to family practices, experiences, values, and competencies (rather than undermining them).
- Build on the strong aspirations and motivation that most parents have for their children's development.
- Offer structured and specific suggestions rather than general advice.
- Provide group opportunities as well as opportunities for one-to-one contact (especially informal contact).
- Empower those involved by fostering autonomy and self-reliance within families, schools, and communities.
- Discuss which of the above indicators of effective partnerships are demonstrated at Pomaria School?
- What do you do at your school to build effective partnerships with your parents, families, whānau, and communities?
- How can you further empower parents and whānau to support their children’s learning?
Goal setting and community workshops are some of the initiatives that have been introduced at Pomaria School to improve educational outcomes for students. This story describes how teachers, parents, and whānau work together to help sustain a lift in achievement for each child.
Reflect on your own school context
Community engagement
Chapter 7 of the School Leadership BES focuses on creating educationally powerful connections with families, whānau, and communities. A key finding in the BES is that there is great potential for school leaders to change patterns of underachievement when they work with parents and whānau to build home–school connections that are focused on teaching and learning.
- What does Pomaria School do to engage with families and whānau?
- How do their strategies link to the evidence about what works?
- What does your school currently do to engage with your families and whānau?
- How can you ensure that you are focused on students' learning and achievement in your interactions with parents, families, and whānau?
Goal setting
The 2007 New Zealand Curriculum states that effective assessment:
- Involves students – They discuss, clarify, and reflect on their goals, strategies, and progress with their teachers, their parents, and one another. This develops students’ capacity for self- and peer assessment, which leads in turn to increased self-direction.
- Supports teaching and learning goals – Students understand the desired outcomes and the criteria for success. Important outcomes are emphasised, and the teacher gives feedback that helps the students reach them.
- Discuss how goal setting at Pomaria School brings these characteristics of effective assessment to life.
- In what ways are these characteristics evident at your school? Is there something that you can change or introduce to embed these characteristics further?
Saga Frost is a parent at Owairaka School in Auckland. She discusses what it is like to be a partner in the learning community at her school and reveals that she didn't realise how much she could impact her child's learning. She challenges other parents to see themselves as people who can add value.
Reflect on your own school context
Home-school partnerships
The School Leadership and Student Outcomes BES found that the most effective home-school partnerships are those in which:
- Parents and teachers are involved together in children's learning.
- Teachers make connections to students' lives.
- Family and community knowledge are incorporated into the curriculum and teaching practices.
- How do the partnerships with parents and whānau at your school help parents to support their children’s learning?
- Do partnerships with parents and whānau enable consideration of students’ competencies across school and home contexts?
- What systems, initiatives, and programmes in your school best support the achievement of an inclusive school community?
Resources
The differences between parent involvement and parent engagement
For parents to feel engaged with their child's school, the school needs to offer more than just parental involvement in fundraising or class trips. In this resource, Larry Ferlazzo describes what kinds of actions a school needs to take to make sure that parents are truly engaged with their child's education.
References
Robinson, V., Hohepa, M. & Lloyd, C. (2009, p. 150). School Leadership and Student Outcomes: Identifying What Works and Why Best Evidence Synthesis, The Ministry of Education.
Longevity – How can we make this a permanent part of the school?
"Educationally powerful partnerships are integrated into school policies, practices, and processes. The importance of whānau participation is made explicit in school policies, practices, and processes and whānau participate in developing and reviewing these policies, practices, and processes. Both of these considerations have a positive impact on the ways in which people across the school work."
- Ruia School-Whanau partnerships for Māori learners | Principles of educationally powerful partnerships
How do you ensure that everyone in your community feels a sense of ownership for the wider school vision and for the community engagement vision?
Everyone in the school community needs to feel ownership and connection to what is happening in their school. To ensure longevity, it is important to have a succession plan so that input and ownership are continued after the first wave of families present at implementation leave the school. Some schools specifically meet with new parents and students at the beginning of the school year to introduce the curriculum from the outset and invite people to join in the decision-making.
Within a school community, the requirements of parents shift depending on their needs and backgrounds. Be prepared for a change or a shift in perspective. Flexibility is the key to longevity.
School stories
Building community relationships with social media
In this EDTalk, Rachel Boyd, DP and eLearning Leader at Waiuku Primary School, shares how she used Facebook and Twitter to continue to engage with her school community.
Sylvia Park teacher Ariana Williams explains the development of Mutukaroa, a parent centre designed to encourage and strengthen community engagement.
Reflect on your own school context
Community engagement is one of the principles that provide the foundation for curriculum decision-making as outlined in The 2007 New Zealand Curriculum.
"The curriculum has meaning for students, connects with their wider lives, and engages the support of their families, whānau, and communities." (The New Zealand Curriculum, 2007, p. 9)
Research shows that student outcomes are enhanced when links are made between the student’s learning at school and other contexts important to the student, particularly home and community settings.
- Staff at Sylvia Park School are working with parents to improve educational outcomes for students. Discuss their approach.
- Are the current ways you are engaging with parents and whānau making a difference to student outcomes?
- When you engage with parents, what is the main purpose of the interaction? Does this need to change? Be made clearer?
- How much do your parents know about the assessment processes in the school and how their children are progressing against those standards or assessments? Is there a need to share more information? Is this information delivered in a range of ways to ensure understanding by all?
- What does having successful home-school partnerships mean to your school and whānau? Do they mean the same thing for all participants?